Given yesterday's privacy-leaning class, I found this article to be both interestting and disturbing - https://www.wired.com/story/clearview-ai-scraping-web/. In short, a private firm--Clearview AI--built a web scraping tool (for law enforcement) that matches criminal suspects to photos scraped from the open source internet (YouTube, Facebook, Venmo etc...) and matches them with their social network profile and footprint. While done in the guise of public safety, it feels creepy as hell.
For the unfamiliar, according to scrapinghub.com, "web scraping, also known as web data extraction, is the process of retrieving or “scraping” data from a website. Unlike the mundane, mind-numbing process of manually extracting data, web scraping uses intelligent automation to retrieve hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the internet’s seemingly endless frontier."
While apparently not illegal, this sort of behavior and internet company appear to cross some ethical lines and seem to violate privacy and decency. While it may provide some level of security, it certainly erodes privacy and therefore liberty. What a time to be alive...
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