REVIEW: Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill's Your Face Belongs to Us explores the world of facial recognition technology and its relations to privacy and surveillance. Hill does a great job explaining how this technology works and the shady things that tech companies and governments can do with it.

The book is well-researched and makes some pretty complicated ideas easy to understand. Hill's writing is engaging, so you won't feel lost even if you're not a tech whiz. It gets a bit repetitive sometimes, and the pacing can be a little over the place.

While it raises some serious questions about privacy, it doesn't dig deep enough into the ethical side. It focuses more on the tech and the potential for abuse than how it hits society.

Overall, Your Face Belongs to Us is a solid read for anyone curious about facial recognition.

Thank you, Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group, for the free advanced copy for my honest review!

In "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It" New York Times Journalist Kashmir Hill delves into the emerging use of facial recognition in surveillance and law enforcement. The result is a hard hitting investigative work that tells an engrossing and often terrifying story. Focusing primarily on the secretive and sinister company Clearview AI, this book avoids sensationalism while exploring the misuse of a powerful emerging technology, and examines the very real threats it poses to society. This book is recommended for anyone who is concerned with how the technology sector is regulated or has concerns about threats to privacy.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Random House Publishing Group, for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Hill documents one of the biggest challenges: being able to identify people in various candid poses, with dim lighting, with poor resolution street surveillance cameras, and looking away from the ever-seeing lens. Another challenge is legal, with lawsuits coming at Clearview from literally all corners of the globe. Leading the charge is ACLU lawyer James Ferg-Cadima and the state of Illinois, which was an early adopter of biometric privacy.

She finds that Clearview created a “red list” which would remove certain VIPs from being tracked by its software by government edict. “Being unseen is a privilege.” Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder to be unseen, because even if you petition Clearview to remote your images from their searches and from public web sources, they still have a copy buried deep within their database. Her book is an essential document about how this technology has evolved, and what we as citizens have to do to protect ourselves.

Gosh this one was so good! It was fascinating to learn about this and truly unsettling! I have no doubt anyone who wants to find someone can figure out a way to do so now... I really hope proper legislation catches up on tech advancements as well! This one is definitely a very important read for our times!

Amazing book. Reads like a dystopian thriller, but by the NY Times. There is one chapter on the history of eugenics that was a little slow, but the rest of the book reads like an exciting thriller and history of the rise of the modern surveillance capitalism state. A fun read and fascinating interviews with the Clearview AI CEO.

Over the last six years, Clearview AI has secretly expanded as a facial recognition tool to be used by law enforcement and the elite. But that changed when Kashmir Hill was able to break open the story of Clearview AI and make the public aware of their powerful facial recognition tool. Clearview AI achieved the goal of capturing billions of images of people online and using it as a search database of faces. While researchers have spent decades theorizing about this technology, Clearview AI released a workable version. Google and Facebook made their own versions of the technology, but chose to shelve the projects from fears of lawsuits and the death of anonimity.
Clearview AI was made by Hoan Ton-That, a computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, who took their technology and courted silicon valley elite to fund and expand their technology, eventually finding a lucrative market in law enforcement. Clearview AI became an open secret among the elite and law enforcement, but hidden from the public. Once it became public, Clearview faced lawsuits from advocates trying to protect biometric information, settling for restricting the company from private use, but permitting law enforcement use. As we move into the future, Clearview AI's story will become an important example of how data-mining companies are created, the dangers they pose to society, and the potential measures people can take to resist these companies.
Kashmir Hill takes her widely publicized New York Times reporting about facial recognition and expands it into a broader history of facial recognition as a technology and Clearview AI as a company. This book is a fascinating narrative of a company moving forward with a potentially dangerous product, contextualized by a lengthy history of facial recognition originating in the eugenics movement before decades of trial and error in making the technology function. I highly recommend this book for someone who wants to understand the risks facial recognition technology has in the world, as the third part does a great job analyzing the dangers of facial recognition's use by law enforcement, like wrongful arrests, a focus on street arrests for minor crimes, and the end to anonymity.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for a copy of Your Face Belongs to Us in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to both #NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group, #RandomHouse for providing me an advance copy of Kashmir Hill’s #nonfiction work, #YourFaceBelongstoUs, in exchange for an honest review.

#YourFaceBelongstoUs is a sharp, well-researched account of the facial recognition tech startup, #ClearviewAI. The book is divided into three parts and opens with a spine-chilling prologue that recounts how Kashmir Hill pursued a tip down the rabbit hole, which resulted in an investigative NY Times article that exposed #ClearviewAI and the Orwellian technology it released upon the world, much to the delight of global law enforcement agencies.

The work reads more like #fiction than nonfiction despite the contrary, making it all the more thrilling for the reader. I encourage even those who have already sifted through the numerous articles published about #ClearviewAI since the book also delves into the origins of personal data collection, facial recognition, surveillance, and artificial intelligence.

Regardless of whether you are a technologist or layperson, this book deserves wide recognition and should be read by anyone. Our #privacy and other civil liberties may very well depend on educating the general public about such technologies to prevent or at least curb some of the examples of mass surveillance detailed in the work.

A cautionary tale of a rising threat against privacy and anonymity presented with a strong voice and enthusiasm. Your Face Belongs to Us is a great read to catch up on the constantly advancing era of technology.