The End of Privacy Is Here (with Kashmir Hill)

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0:32Maybe there's some person on this train that uses PIMIs and is going to make the connection between what I'm talking about and the fact that I'm working on a story about this. I just think we'll have to go through life with that feeling of you're under surveillance all the time by the people around you. They could connect this to you in a way that could haunt you.

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1:53Some students have already done that. I covered this a while back where a couple of students paired the Ray-Ban glasses with facial recognition tech and people lookup tools to instantly reveal the identity of somebody that they looked at. You now also have massively viral TikTok or Instagram accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post that person's name and other personal information online. I don't think we've fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else in a near instant. To talk through this, I wanted to speak to Kashmir Hill.

2:37She's a reporter at the New York Times and the author of Your Face Belongs to Us, A Tale of AI, A Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy. That book is a really deep dive into Clearview AI, which is a tool used by law enforcement agencies. In this conversation, I really wanted to ask Kashmir more about what happens when everybody, you and I, anybody else, has access to facial recognition technology. do you own a pair of meta smart glasses like have you bought them or got them yet i bought them a couple years ago when i did a story about uh turning all my decision making over to generative ai and so i bought the glasses for that story but then they weren't very useful and i didn't end up including them in the story oh that's funny yeah so this was a couple years ago, as you say.

3:33I mean, that's like ancient history when it comes to generative AI. How useful or not very useful were the glasses at the time? I remember wearing them around Manhattan. And I would ask like, where should I go for lunch? Like, where am I? How do I get there? They couldn't answer those kinds of questions. There was that famous video of Mark Zuckerberg wearing them in his closet, helping him select clothes. So I tried them for that. And they just, they weren't there yet. It was better to use apps on my phone. Yeah, and I guess you haven't taken that generation of glasses you bought out of the closet and dusted them off.

4:09Are they still in there gathering dust? Yeah, they're still gathering dust. Like along with my Oculus glasses that I bought for a living in the metaverse story. Of course, the glasses are going to get more relevant because from all the indications from your reporting, especially stuff from Wired, stuff from the information as well. Meta is very much trying to implement some form of facial recognition products or service or tool with its AI smart glasses, right? I guess before we go back in time and like figure out how we got here, what is your understanding and what has your reporting showed about what Meta is planning at the moment when it comes to facial recognition and its smart glasses.

5:00I think the dream for Meta and some other companies that are kind of trying to come up with a device like this is how do we pair, you know, a kind of AI assistant with your everyday life? And so the way Meta is imagining it from, you know, what we have seen in these memos, what I've and others have heard talked about internally is that they want these glasses to kind of be always on, passively kind of recording or collecting information so that they can respond to the environment around you. And so the idea would be the face recognition is necessary because you're walking through the office and the glasses will tell you, oh, there's Joseph.

5:37You were supposed to ping him about the podcast details. You guys should talk about that. And it would be this idea of it's your little helper, kind of like the way that politicians have people that are next to them and whisper in their ears to tell them who that person is, what they should talk about. They want to give that to all of us with these glasses. how far along are they with that plan? Like how far along the process of developing that are they? Yeah, with the kind of having it always on passively, collecting information, that part is hard because of limited battery life. The face recognition part, I mean, that is solved.

6:17You know, Meta has had that capability for a very long time. That part's pretty simple, technically, but kind of politically, legally, socially it's a different question. I guess that's a good time to go back and of course I learned this from your reporting and your book and to be fair kind of just being in the moment as well. I feel I remember this where Google and Meta did have the capability to do facial recognition. We all remember way back on Facebook where, you know, tagging your friends was a thing or being automatically tagged in photos was a thing where there's a drunk party that you went to and it was unfortunately somebody with a 2003 or whatever or later digital camera taking photos of you everywhere I guess a little bit later than that and then you regret that and ask your friend please please could you not do that so yes they've had the facial recognition tech tech for a bit but they never really went further than that right it was kind of that novel thing that kind of helpful for some people but they didn't roll it out widely like back at that time what did google and obviously meta especially think about facial recognition like what did they think about this capability back then yeah i mean in the early days so we're let's like a decade back you know when they were first developing face recognition it was very much around social networking.

7:51And for Facebook in particular, this was a huge use case. When you got one of those messages that said you've been tagged in three new photos, there was nothing else that was more likely to get somebody to click and go to Facebook. And so they were thinking, how do we expand this? How do we roll this out? And one way is instead of relying on your users to manually tag people, get the software to do it for them to make it super easy. And so it was very much like, Like, yeah, how do we identify people's friends in photos? And then internally, they were already starting to think about using it as a kind of general person identifier.

8:28And there were efforts inside Google, inside Meta to do that. They developed these products. I actually watched this. I wrote about it in a book. But there was this video inside of Facebook in 2017 of this engineer. And he has a smartphone on the brim of his hat. And he's looking around at different people in the room. and it's calling out their names. So they had internal prototypes, but the companies were really worried about releasing this. Eric Schmidt, the then chairman and CEO of Google, famously said in 2011 that this was the one technology that Google had developed and had decided was too dangerous to release.

9:04And so yeah, it was out there, but they didn't want to be... None of them wanted to be the first company to release that product. And they bought up all the face recognition startups that were kind of thinking about releasing that. And yeah, it was kind of this rare time that Silicon Valley held something back from developing and sat on it for, I would say, like a decade. It kind of kept it from being mainstreamed. But that changed a few years ago. Do you remember what any of those startups were that were planning to maybe go down that route and then the tech giants said, actually know will pull you inside.

9:45Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was Face.com, which was an Israeli startup that Facebook bought. There was PitPat, which was a company that spun out of Carnegie Mellon. And they had developed software that police were starting to use. I think they said that their software was used to identify the Boston Marathon bombers. There was one called Polar Rose. There was a Swedish startup that Apple bought. But yeah, there are a lot of small startups that were kind of solving this problem of kind of computer vision as applied to the face. And yeah, they all got kind of pulled internally to these tech companies.

10:23Yeah, pulled internally. And then of course, maybe develop capabilities internally, but not really for the public until we fast forward a little bit to where we are now. Not to sort of speed up too quickly, because there's obviously something between back then and now. But what changed, do you think? Like, was there some sort of crystallizing moment or some sort of catalyst that told these tech giants, or at least meta, Hey, actually, maybe you can explore this. It's hard to, you know, point to one thing and say this is it. But there was basically a new wave of face recognition startups that you and I have written about.

11:04you know, Clearview AI, PimEyes. Clearview was kind of created a face identifying app by scraping billions of photos from the internet. You could match somebody's face to their social media profile or other internet photos. And they were selling it to police. PimEyes is an online website that anyone can access that will do the same thing. You upload a photo of somebody and it will try to find other photos of them on the public web. They don't do social media sites. But around kind of 2019, 2020, some of these startups were starting to come online and sell their products. And they essentially were the canaries in the coal mine for how is this going to go?

11:46What's going to happen to these companies? How is society going to see them? How are they going to get cracked down on by regulators? Fast forward to now, those companies are still around. Pimlize is still there. There's other face-recognizing companies. And so I think the tech giants are starting to think, maybe this is something that is mainstream enough for us to play in these waters. Certainly Meta is thinking that internally. Obviously, as you say, Clearview is for cops, although they have flirted a little bit with private corporate customers as well. I think some reporting from BuzzFeed News at the time.

12:23PimEyes, very different in that, as you say, it is a website that anybody can just log on and use. Do you sort of remember your reaction to seeing PimEyes for the first time? Because when that came out, I was kind of blown away. Like, oh, okay, it's over now. Everybody can just do this. Yeah, I was pretty shocked. I remember the first time I started using it, I was actually testing it on my colleagues' faces. And it seemed very much like it was catering to people looking for illicit photos. Like you would search somebody's face and the images that would be returned were kind of blurred as if there was something spicy going on in them.

13:02So I specifically remember thinking, wow, this is like the worst possible way this could go. They're explicitly saying like, go find people's revenge porn that's out there. But yes, I remember PimEyes being on the scene and being like, Oh, wow. Okay. Anybody can use this. It's just a matter of knowing about it. Now it's, gosh, when is it? It's 2026. It's like more than half a decade later and it's still there. So I'm almost shocked it's not kind of an app that's on everyone's phone at this point. Why do you think that is? Is it not sort of a everyday consumer app because maybe the data set just isn't that good?

13:43I have used Pymize for some fruitful investigations. You know, I've used it on a drug trafficker who I followed for a long, long time. And then I searched his face and actually brought up his wedding photos, which I couldn't have found before because he had the wedding or at least the announcement website of his wedding under a different name. So I literally could not search by the name. It was very effective to search by the face. and I found him with his, you know, his baby and his wife and all of his family in Turkey and that sort of thing. So obviously useful, I think, for a journalist there, useful for OSINT investigators and all that sort of thing is kind of an accepted, like socially or in the industry, accepted tool to use now where it's been officially implemented into all sorts of other OSINT tools where they'll just have a face search in there now, which I still find weird, but it is more widely accepted.

14:38Why do you think PimEyes is not on everybody's phone? Why isn't everybody using this? I don't think most people need face recognition day to day. I just don't think it's that useful. And it's still inconvenient enough to do the search that it's probably easier for most people in a social situation just to say, I forgot your name. Can you remind me of who you are? I mean, this is the use case that most often comes up when Meta talks about it. They're like, oh, it's so embarrassing when you're a cocktail party and you're meeting someone for the fourth time and you should know their name and we could give it to you.

15:13We could put a name tag on them so that you don't have that embarrassing social faux pas. But for most people, do you really need to know a stranger's identity? Not necessarily. Where I see this show up the most kind of just in the general public is those TikTok videos, viral videos where somebody does something embarrassing or does something outrageous, like a fan in a crowd and then people identify them. That's where I most often see people like trying to identify a stranger. But in day-to-day life, I don't know how necessary it is. Yeah. I don't think quote unquote normal people are using facial recognition.

15:52It is, again, the journalistic example I gave, there's law enforcement stuff. And then apart from that, it's people trying to unmask cam girls or cam models, people trying to unmask random people in videos like you outlined, grifters on x or twitter trying to use it there for some reason and when we reported on a taylor swift fan tiktok account for some reason that was using the facial recognition tech and i believe it was pim eyes if i'm remembering correctly to look at like oh here's a bouncer at a taylor swift consult that's just freakish behavior it's a freakish and i'm very comfortable saying that And I don't like to be over the top or anything in my reporting, but we literally put in the headline, like, the end of privacy is this TikTok account.

16:39Because I genuinely believe that where now anybody who feels like it can basically unmask you if you happen to be in the background of a video. And I think something has fundamentally shifted there. What do you think about that, where the tech has now moved from the hands of government to now anybody can use it? What has changed there in that shift? Yeah, I mean, I think most people don't have the inclination to use it. I think what could shift is if this does become mainstreamed. You know, if Meta does decide, as it's been talking about, to put this feature into its glasses and just start selling that to people, then it leaps from you have to go to this weird website to do this, to, oh, this is just a feature that I have access to through one of the biggest technology companies in the world, then I think people just start using it.

17:31You get on a train and you just kind of casually look around. Who else am I on the train with? You're at a restaurant. You just start looking around. Just because you can, it's so easy to do. It's very seamless. Meta says they don't want to do it this way. That it wouldn't be identify a stranger. It would be identify people in your social network. But I just think that once the guardrails start falling, that that would happen. And I think that what shifts is that if we do start living in that world, you just have to be so much more scared all the time that you're going to make a mistake. And I just think it would be similar to the way that like when we go online and you're on a social network and you kind of say something and you have to be very careful.

18:13Like you're like, is this going to come back to haunt me? You'd have to live your life like that. I was on the train the other day having a sensitive conversation and I stopped right away. I was like, oh, I can't have this conversation here. Somebody might realize who I am. Maybe there's some person on this train that uses PIMIs and is going to make the connection between what I'm talking about and the fact that I'm working on a story about this. I just think we'll have to go through life with that feeling of you're under surveillance all the time by the people around you. They could connect this to you in a way that could haunt you.

18:45Yeah. Yeah. And like, that's a serious example where you're talking about a sense of story and you realize, oh, I shouldn't do this because someone will overhear it. And then I think of the classic tweet, which was something like, oh, I love waffles. And someone replies, oh, so you hate pancakes then? It's like, no, I'm talking about waffles. You have to live like that in the real world where anything you do might get taken out of context. You might get unmasked immediately buy a pair of smart glasses and you have to constantly moderate your behavior. Not that I'm advocating for go out and be a social nuisance.

19:20Like you won't be able to be normal in public anymore. And like, that's terrifying to me. It could really, really change people's behavior. And I've always heard this. There's some people that say that would be great. Having to think through everything you do, having to be more careful, that'd make us a better society. Everyone will be better behaved. But I just don't think that's how the world works. And I've been hearing that. I mean, covering privacy for two decades now. In the beginning, there were definitely these kind of radical transparency advocates who would say, oh, we'll reach a time when you won't be embarrassed anymore because we all live our lives online.

19:59We'll all make mistakes and we'll be a more forgiving society because everyone will have their mistakes. But I just don't think we've gone that way. We just, we love to attack people when they do something wrong. So yeah, I don't think that we would have, you know, a better behaved society. We would just have a constantly punished society. I think people would hate it. I really think people would want to live in a world that didn't have devices anymore and have spaces where you couldn't bring these in, which we're already seeing with Meta's glasses.

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24:41That actually leads perfectly to what I was going to ask now, which is there is obviously a backlash to these glasses. And they haven't even launched the facial recognition stuff yet. It's not even out yet and people are mad already. And of course, we had the Google Glass stuff, the whole glass hole thing many years ago. I still think the Google Glass as a device looked pretty cool. Really? Wow. Oh my gosh. I'm going to get hateful. It looked very interesting, you know. Yeah, I know. I'm not expecting you to agree with this. But there is like a community of people who buy the old Google Glass headsets and they will hack them and like put open source software on them and that sort of thing.

25:19And I try to adapt them for more modern and privacy centric use case and all that. Anyway, so people hated Google Glass. People got punched in the face. It was all very, very funny. And fast forward now, people are very, very mad about the meta glasses. I don't think we've seen as many people get punched in the face. I guess that's hard to quantify. But I covered a guy who made an app that would detect for glasses nearby. What are you seeing when it comes to the backlash to the metaglasses? I mean, I hear them regularly called perv glasses or pervert glasses. Courthouses have banned them, like New York courthouses.

25:56ICE recently banned people wearing metaglasses, which I'm like, man, you've got PR problems when your technology is being banned by ICE. Though I think that's probably more for not creating more evidence that can be seized in investigations. I think some schools are starting to think about banning them. So yeah, I'm seeing that kind of spread. I feel like every week there's a new story about how the glasses are being misused, whether it's to harass women. Futurism just had a great story about how high school boys are using them to harass girls at school. They're doing better than Google Glass was.

26:34like I haven't heard a punch in the face story, but not much better. But they seem to be selling well. They're certainly being adopted more widely than Google Glass was. And I think they look better, I guess. I guess we disagree there. Wait, wait, wait. Hang on, hang on. I did not say that Google Glass looks better than a pair of Ray-Bans. I just mean Google Glass by itself. That's kind of a cool like Star Trek looking technology. There is a photo somewhere on the internet of me wearing Google Glasses. I don't know where it is at the moment. Well, you're trying to get it removed from the internet.