BONUS - Exposing the dark side of facial recognition technology

**Chris Spyrou** (0:08)
Hey, it's Chris Spyrou with you, and welcome to this bonus Sunday episode of The Briefing. Last week, two of the biggest names in Australian retail, Coles and Woolies, confirmed they've tested facial recognition technology. They say it's about fighting retail crime. But it's reignited a big question about where this is all heading. Because facial recognition isn't sci-fi anymore. It's how a lot of us unlock our phones and what those smart gates at the airport use to match your face to your passport. Earlier this year, Bunnings was given the green light to scan customer faces, but only where they've been upfront about it and to pick out people who've been violent, abusive or banned from its stores. But now, with Coles and Woolies getting around it, privacy experts are getting nervous. Their big worry is what's called scope creep, that a tool brought in to stop crime grows into scanning every ordinary shopper who walks through the door.
So what exactly does facial recognition do and just how far can it go?
There's a whole lot we can learn from one of the wildest cautionary tales out there, the Clearview Ai scandal from a few years ago. In this bonus episode, we're revisiting an episode of Secrets We Keep Uncovered from our former colleague Joey Watson, who digs into how this tech was quietly used by the Australian Federal Police and the scandal that threw it right into the spotlight. Here's that episode of Secrets We Keep Uncovered for you now.

**Joey Watson** (1:31)
Joey Watson here. In an increasingly interconnected world, journalistic investigations don't stop at borders. When it became known that a shadowy facial recognition company called Clearview Ai had created a massive database capable of identifying almost anyone, anywhere. Reporters around the globe picked up the trail, working to uncover how this start-up could reshape privacy and policing internationally. Here in Australia, tech reporter, Cameron Wilson dug into the Australian Federal Police's documents for years, revealing disturbing details.
Before we start, a content warning. This episode contains strong language.
This story starts in the United States. It's January 2020, and the New York Times tech reporter, Cashmere Hill, has just dropped a big investigation. Her expose is titled, The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy As We Know It.

**Cameron Wilson** (2:41)
It was unveiled by the New York Times that a start-up founded by an Australian is being used by law enforcement agencies all around the world to keep track of people's faces. But how?

**Joey Watson** (2:52)
Quickly, the news shoots its way across the globe.

**Cashmere Hill** (2:55)
This company, Clearview Ai, claims it has scraped Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Venmo, and has just millions of photos of people from the public internet, which makes it a kind of search engine for faces, anyone's face, and not just images that they've willingly given up to law enforcement, say, when you get a passport.

**Joey Watson** (3:13)
Flying commentators and privacy advocates are in a frenzy. They deem it pretty much the start of the Big Brother era.

**Cameron Wilson** (3:21)
30 billion images from Facebook in social media sites and gave them to police. So now they have your name and your face.

**Chris Spyrou** (3:29)
They know exactly who you are, and they can run that through some computer that has a database of everything.

**Joey Watson** (3:35)
That was a big thing.

**Cameron Wilson** (3:36)
Social media, everything you've ever done. Back to a perpetual police line up. Oh, so no more of that.

**Joey Watson** (3:42)
The fallout is immediate. Tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google send cease and desist letters to Clearview for violating their terms of service. Privacy advocates warn that this is mass surveillance without consent.
Lawmakers in countries like Canada, the EU and Australia launch privacy investigations.

**Cameron Wilson** (4:02)
Clearview Ai is a tech company that really was at the front of something that is dystopian, but now is unfortunately quite normal.

**Joey Watson** (4:14)
Crikey Magazine's tech reporter Cam Wilson is immediately following the story.

**Cameron Wilson** (4:20)
They were a company that pioneered doing one to many facial recognition software that was trained using billions of images that they scraped from the internet. So putting those two things together, the technology and the database, this company, which was co-founded by an Australian, this was something that was truly new.
It was a startup that despite not really having that much behind it, it didn't come out of any of the major tech companies, was able to do something both by combining an immersion technology, facial recognition technology and a sophistication that allowed them to do also known as one to many comparisons. So to be able to take a picture of someone and compare it to an enormous database, combined with a enormous database that was obtained by illegitimate means, that had scraped from the internet from millions and billions of people who had uploaded images of themselves and others without actually knowing that was going to be used by a company for its own gain to enable mass surveillance.