Another Clearview AI?

Happy Thursday and happy Pride Month! This intro to the Privacy Insider newsletter focuses on the influential role that privacy law has played in securing equal rights for our LGBTQ+ friends, family members, and neighbors — brought to you by our Senior Content Strategist, Seanna Tucker.

As a queer, interracial couple, the month of June is an important one for me and my wife. Most obviously, it’s Pride Month, where we mourn this year’s losses, revere the heroes who’ve helped us come this far, and celebrate our existence. 

But June is about more than that for us. This month, we also get to celebrate the anniversaries of two foundational United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions — without which, we wouldn’t be a legally wed couple. 

On June 12, 1967, SCOTUS decided in favor of the (appropriately named) Lovings, an interracial couple who were prosecuted for their marriage, which was illegal in Virginia at the time. The basis of their decision in Loving v. Virginia comes from the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses in the 14th Amendment. While privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the Due Process clause, it’s often inferred as existing within the “penumbras — or shadowy edges — of rights that are enumerated.” 

And on June 26, 2015, same sex marriage became legal when SCOTUS sided with Obergefell in Obergefell v. Hodges, which again cited Due Process and Equal Protection. Justice Kennedy drafted the Court’s opinion, stating in reference to privacy, “Indeed, the Court has noted it would  be contradictory ‘to recognize a right of privacy with respect to other matters of family life and not with respect to the decision to enter the relationship that is the foundation of the family in our society.’” 

I was with my wife for 10 years before we tied the knot, and often, people would scold us. “What took you so long?!” They forget it wasn’t legal for us to wed until six years into our relationship. Honestly, it feels so normal now that even I forget we couldn’t get married. And none of it would have happened if the SCOTUS didn’t recognize the importance of a right to privacy. 

All that to say, I hope you have a month full of pride, love, and privacy!

Gartner Identifies Top Five Trends in Privacy Through 2024

“By year-end 2024,” said Nader Henein, VP Analyst at Gartner, “75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.” Fortunately, subscribers to this newsletter have already taken the first steps toward complying with those privacy regulations. Expanded regulatory coverage isn’t the only trend Gartner has identified, however. Click below to read the rest of the story.

Read more

PimEyes: An alarmingly accurate face search engine that anyone can use

For $30 a month, anyone can upload a photo of a face and find a series of photos of the same individual from almost anywhere on the internet. New York Times reporters tested the service out on their own faces and discovered numerous photos of themselves, including both photos they had uploaded as well as ones where they were mere background figures. 

Unlike Clearview AI, PimEyes is available to anybody, not just law enforcement. The service also does not scrape photos from social media sites. While the service has drawn the attention of data protection authorities, the company claims to  not store photos or individual faces, but rather provides URLs for individual images associated with the facial features they contain.

Read more

I tried to read all my app privacy policies. It was 1 million words.

Facebook recently revised its infamously dense privacy policy to something a little more understandable. The change was desperately needed — in fact, objective measures of readability found that Facebook’s privacy policy was only slightly easier to read than Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. However, revising its privacy policy for simplicity also ballooned its length up to 12,000 words. 

In this Washington Post article, a reporter attempts to read all of the privacy policies they’ve agreed to before diving into legal and technological approaches to give consumers a meaningful way to consent to data privacy policies.

Read more

Spotlight on Osanians: Get to know Tyson

Ever wanted to know more about the people at Osano? Our new Spotlight series is the first place you should look. We’ll regularly interview Osanians to learn more about their passions, their role at Osano, their interest in data privacy, and more.

This week, we talked with Tyson Stewart, a Senior Software Engineer at Osano. Check out the full interview here.

If Osano sounds like an environment where you could thrive, why not check out our Careers page? We might have the perfect opportunity for you.