This week in dystopia.

This week in dystopia: The New York Times has an article about the next steps in dystopian future. A start-up evolving face recognition algorithms, fed by a database with facial images, scraped from the open web.

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

The New York Times: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Further, the article describes the sheer size of the database. At a rate of massive duplicate numbers, three billion images is still impressive.

The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

The New York Times: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

In times in which criticism of big tech is on the rise. Just this week Jannis Brühl, Head of Tech News Department at @sueddeutsche Zeitung published an opinion that this technology is dangerous and should be banned,. The article include an appeal to German government to create legislation to do so. Jannis is in good company with other tech critics like Eyvgen Morozov

Source: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It