New York Times reporter and author Kashmir Hill joins Tim to talk about her new book called, “Your Face Belongs to Us: A secretive startups quest to end privacy as we know it.” It’s about facial recognition tech, how prevalent it already is, and how we are leaving the age where privacy could be expected. In 2019, Kashmir wrote a story that exposed a future where anyone who shows their face in public will lose all privacy.
Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times. She writes about such things as privacy and how technology us creeping into new frontiers in our lives, oftentimes invading out privacy.
But that’s just a start. What happens when you lose your privacy? What happens when government, police agencies, private citizens snoop…and they somehow find your face in connection with something they’re investigating?
What if they connect you to something bad, and the technology made a mistake?
These questions aren’t academic. There are a number of companies already in the business of scraping the internet for photos of you and millions of others. They can piece it all together in seconds to determine much more about you than you realize.
But there is one company that caught the attention of our guest, Kashmir. A very secretive company that appeared to be more powerful and capable than all of the other companies out there.
So, my first question was for Kashmir was, how did you find out about this company called Clearview AI?
Links
- Your Face Belongs to Us: A secretive startups quest to end privacy as we know it, by Kashmir Hill (Amazon)
- Kashmir Hill Author Page, Penguin Random House
- Your Face Belongs to Us (Review), The Guardian
- The Secretive Company that May End Privacy as We Know It, New York Times
- Your Face is Not Your Own, New York Times Magazine
About this Episode’s Guest Kashmir Hill
Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at The New York Times, where her writing about the intersection of privacy and technology pioneered the genre. Hill has worked and written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Gizmodo, Popular Science, Forbes, and many others.
