The Biased Movie and Book Club, Episode 4 - Your Face Belongs to Us

Source: Penguin Random House

Kashmir Hill’s Your Face Belongs to Us is a fascinating and unsettling deep dive into the rise of facial recognition technology, focusing on Clearview AI, the company that quietly scraped billions of photos from the internet to build a tool that could identify almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. The people who developed and control this technology, then had the enormous, unchecked power to choose what to do with it.

What struck me was, again, how the drive to push technology to do new, revolutionary things was done without stopping to think about what the potential damage could be from using this technology in the real world. It was developed quietly, with no guardrails, regulation, or public debate. There was no consent. It's terrifying to think that just a few ambitious engineers working with off-the-shelf tools and massive amounts of public data could do. They scraped Venmo. That data, the names, the photos, the transactions, were available "publicly", even if people did not consent to how it was used this way. And now suddenly, their faces, our faces, became searchable assets in a private database. Legislators and laws meant to protect us never imagined a technology of this scale.

This book isn’t just about privacy, it’s about the power that data brings, and how once it's once captured and scaled, can be used in ways its subjects never imagined. For people developing products and technologies, this should be a a wake-up call. It’s a reminder that data, once collected, rarely stays in its original context, and that our ethical responsibilities don’t end at deployment.

We’re already behind on regulating this technology, and it’s up to those of us building it to push for accountability, transparency, and clear limits. Let's hope the protections can catch up soon.

Have you read it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on where tech ends and ethics begin.