At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.
If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.
This was my first thought. All of our data is already on a marketplace for companies to buy and sell. What is stopping any government agency, federal or smaller from simply participating in this?
We need to fix the root of the problem if this is to be stopped.
I heard from someone that used to work on the military side of things of data collection. He said a few years ago Amazon came in with their servers and set up their tech and then had to teach the gov side about data collection and all that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gov just started contracting out their spying.
“The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,” Wyden wrote.
The government says selfies for AI verification are to “protect” children from such content but in reality we know it’s all to create a database with biometric hashes of everyone and create the long-awaited dystopia of 24/7 mass surveillance. The government that completes the task first comes out ahead, and it seems that China is winning the dispute
There is a 0% chance that AI can accurately determine if someone is 18 or not, even with hypothetical futuristic AI technology. Some 20-year-olds look very young. Some 16-year-olds look shockingly old. And nobody changes very significantly between the day of their 18th birthday and the day they were 17 years, 364 days.
Hell, even 13-15 year olds are looking much older. I genuinely saw one in normal clothes, took a guess based on her being around maybe 20. Saw her a day later in school uniform. And only under 16’s wear them.
Really did make me realise I am shit at age guessing.
To quote the Simpsons: “0% is a percentage as well!” And that will be more than enough for politicians who know nothing about the topic and are blinded by the hot tech-buzzword of the minute (especially if it turns out they or some of their friends can make a shitload of money with it. I love capitalism and democracy.)
As an outside observer, UK politicians (even Conservatives) seem to tend to be a bit better at this sort of thing than American or Australian (“the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”) politicians. There’s a much stronger tendency for their back benchers to vote against the party line than we have, too, which is great for deliberative democracy.
To be fair, that at least is hypothetically possible. Working out someone’s age exactly purely based on their face is not even possible, so you can argue against it very easily from a purely technical standpoint.
Facial recognition with a database is quite good today, and will only get better. To argue against that you need to start getting into the privacy and ethical arguments.
Exactly, this is something that even humans would have a hard time doing. Even though AI can do many things better than humans, humans are better at vision at the moment.
Eh, humans are better at certain kinds of vision—particularly on tasks that deal with non-white people where the AI was trained mostly on white people.
But things where the vision is looking at very fine detail, AI is very good at. Like determining if a patient has a disease based on a retinal scan or other medical imagery.
And I think it’s fair to say that, at least superficially, the problem in this thread seems like it might be more similar to those medical cases where an AI could do a really good job. The problem is that actually, no. There’s no known marker that could determine age with the level of accuracy that would be required for this task.
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