Book Review: "Your Face Belongs to Us" by Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill writes this book as an almost warning to us, I say almost because she also clearly demonstrates that throughout history, we have already been warned about these people. These people who, under the guise of what she aptly identifies as 'security theatre' actually practice far-right aligning politics reaching to the cusp of eugenics. Your Face Belongs To Us is a nonfiction masterpiece of that history, covering the way in which privacy and anonymity has been eroded over time in the name of this security theatre. And, as more and more companies align with it, what this could potentially mean for the future of facial recognition. The real question therefore is not purely 'when' but it is also 'why'. The 'why' though is a question that is worth asking as they definitely don't want to answer it.

The author shows us exactly how the 'why' question is ignored, pushed aside and shoved about in the way she handles asking her own questions. The Clearview AI software claims to be able to help law enforcement catch criminals through facial recognition and this can be from grainy CCTV photos all the way through to mug shots. Clearview AI seems to have the ability to capture a person's entire history just from them being in the background of a picture that someone somewhere may have uploaded to their 'private' Facebook account whilst attending an event. Highly invasive stuff right? Of course it is. When it comes to this and having so many pictures of herself on the internet, she naturally asks around the people who use it to run her own pictures through the software to see what it knows about her. Nothing apparently. Ah! But atop of this, a phone call is made to an office in Texas where the person helping her use the software is reprimanded for putting a journalist's face through the program. His access is quickly and swiftly turned off. As we can see, there is something really shifty and weird going on and the amount of times that our author was simply ignored when she reached out to offices that don't exist make it all the more questionable.

Enter computer engineer and later, good friend of men of unusual character such as Peter Thiel: Hoan Ton-That. The creator of Clearview AI once worked on Facebook apps and the author tells us that though he is very clearly of a minority group, he doesn't mind embracing a far-right American ideology. That truly scares me and couldn't be more ironic if it tried. As we are taken through the history of eugenics, we see men like Cesare Lombroso pop back into the consciousness as these people around the facial recognition software spout agreements with debunked scientific theories of the 19th century including physiognomy and phrenology. The racial and classist undertones of these theories could not be louder to the point that the term 'undertone' is not even appropriate, and so almost by design, they are labelled (and rightly so) as the far-right nutcases that they are. A seemingly primary school level of biology eludes them.

We are told these stories of the past and present almost concurrently, the author links what these pasts once said about race, gender, IQ and sexuality and how they relate to what someone 'looks' like - which seems to become the basis for the facial recognition software. It's not just about finding out who someone is on the surface, it is about tracing every single digital footprint they have ever made. It is about accessing data that is not there to be accessed and it is about producing a hierarchy in which those who own the software get to decide who looks 'criminal' and who does not. I don't know about you but I would not want a bunch of far-right incels who don't know basic science to be deciding anything as much as what they are going to eat for breakfast - that would probably use too many braincells for them. And we know why this is: it is all born out of a desire to desperately have some delusional mock evidence that they are better than everyone else even though anyone with half a brain cell can see the biases.

Let's just put it this way: if you need a software in which you illegally harvest up people's digital footprints, data and information in order to make yourself believe that you are more powerful and more capable when it is only you who believes in the eugenics idea in the first place - then maybe your eugenics ideals might just take you out first. And we see it throughout history over and over again, the less progressive the person is, the less desirable they are to befriend, work with, mate with etc. Their line dies out. Perhaps this is just a way of throwing that cope into the stratosphere and, as right wing men often do, make their insignificance everyone else's problem.