I just finished reading an eye opening book titled Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy As We Know It by Kashmir Hill. It is the story of a little known company called Clearview AI, which has scraped billions of photos from the public internet and developed an eerily accurate algorithm used to identify unwary strangers in said photos, ostensibly for security purposes by law enforcement.

“Computer scientists who had toiled in academic labs and Silicon Valley offices had paved the way not just for Clearview but for future data-mining companies that may come for our voices, our expressions, our DNA, and our thoughts,” Hill writes. “They yearned to make computers ever more powerful, without reckoning with the full scope of the consequences. Now we have to live with the results.”

However, Hill is quick to add, “It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that lawmakers at the federal level could rein in this technology,” if only they exercised the political will to do it. And she notes that large tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft surprisingly have shelved their own facial recognition projects until the associated legal and ethical ramifications are sorted out.

As Hill notes above, data mining companies seek ever more of our personal data, requiring us to be proactive in protecting it, as I wrote about in my earlier post titled Privacy IS Power. Here in Virginia we are empowered with the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, which specifies six consumer rights: the rights to confirm, access, correct, delete, opt out, and obtain a copy of one’s personal data.

Even privacy conscious companies like Apple place us in potential jeopardy with their use of such technologies as Face ID and Touch ID rather than less invasive non-biometric passcodes. Besides iris scans and finger prints, other types of personal data we need to attempt to safeguard include our signature, voice, and genetic data such as DNA results from the likes of ancestry searches, among others.