Beware What You Share

Despite the popular trend to share selfies and all sorts of personal information on social media, it is something I have never done, because in the back of my mind was a little niggle that made me pause, and then opt Not to plaster my Facebook page with pics of myself, posts about where I am at any particular time, or any personal information or issues on what I am doing or experiencing. If anything, I have kept it really light.

And now I am soooo glad I did that. Why? Because of Hoan Ton-That (born Cam-Hoan Ton-That) and his company, Clearview AI.

A very clever boy, Hoan Ton-That grew up in Lyneham, Canberra, where he attended Lyneham High School, finishing Year 10 in 2003. He completed Years 11 and 12 at Hawker College and from there went on to the Australian National University (ANU) to study for his Bachelor of Information Technology degree. Ton-That registered a company in 2006 named Software for Mom Pty Ltd and appeared to be on his way to a bright future. Then he dropped out of university in 2007, before finishing his studies, and took himself off to Silicon Valley.

The first hiccup in what appeared to be the start of a promising career was the accusation that surfaced in America in 2009, which alleged Hoan Ton-That was behind two phishing scams, and in a court case currently running in the US against CLearview AI, it has been alleged that Ton-Than was also involved in other companies, including ViddyHo.com (another alleged phishing site which conned users into sharing access to their gmail accounts, which allowed the site to then generate spam to those on the users’ contact list). Not good.

The other alleged phishing site apparently connected to Ton-That was Fastforwarded.com, which attempted to extract passwords from users by fraudulent means. Also not good.

And then there’s Clearview AI. This company was founded in 2017, initially under the name Smartcheckr, and is a powerful facial recognition technology which sells access to the site to various law enforcement agencies, commercial businesses and a number of government agencies who can then upload images and, with the aid of artificial intelligence, make comparisons to the huge store of photographs in Ton-That’s database. If they find any matches, the database will then provide all the information it has available on those people; information that has been mainly accessed from their social media accounts.

But according to Clearview AI’s lawyer, Tor Ekeland, it is all above board and Clearview AI’s primary purpose is “focused on providing it’s groundbreaking and effective technology to assist law enforcement in the US in identifying perpetrators of horrific crimes such as trafficking and child abuse…”. He goes on to say more of the same but disputing that, I suppose, would be the class action Clearview AI is also facing in Illinois for breaching privacy provisions, a similar action in Virginia also and as a result, the police force in New Jersey has been advised to stop using it.

Here in Australia, it has surfaced that police officers in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland have also held a number of registered accounts with Clearview AI. The Federal Police have too. So how did they get onto it? Clearview AI did offer a free pilot trial and the belief is that most of the officers with access had signed up for the freebie, as opposed to signing up for an account, which comes with a very expensive yearly fee.

An investigation into Clearview AI has been launched by The Australian Information Commissioner and the site has been disabled in Australia. That’s good news, but what isn’t all that great is that Hoan Ton-That has already built a database of over three billion photographs, almost all of which have been “scraped” from social media accounts via computer programs more commonly known as spiders, or web crawlers. Many Australians were scraped. Twitter, Google and Facebook have apparently served the company with “cease and desist” communications and Apple has also blocked the app from its store.

But that’s a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, isn’t it? Ton-That already has that enormous database and most of it was obtained with neither the knowledge, nor the permission of those he scraped, and he is happy to sell that information to the highest bidder. The photos and accompanying information were scraped intentionally and unfortunately, anyone who is good for the fee could get access to it, not just legitimate law enforcement agencies. Private commercial facial recognition databases are not bound by the same laws that apply to similar programs under government control and that leaves the door wide open to undesirables getting a hold of it, and once they have it… Fortunately, I am highly unlikely to be an attractive candidate for this site because of the lack of pics and info, but unfortunately I can’t say the same with any real assurance about some of my online friends and family members and that’s a concern.

So just be careful what you post, because there is probably another Hoan Ton-That out there somewhere. Possibly more than one.

And they’re looking for someone just like you.

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *