Delete Your Account is a new podcast hosted by journalist Roqayah Chamseddine and her plucky sidekick Kumars Salehi. Every week they will talk about important stories from the worlds of politics and pop culture, both on and off-line, in a way that will never bore you. They’re radical leftists, but not that kind. The other kind. The fun kind.
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Episode 159 - Face Off
This week, Roqayah and Kumars are joined by returning guest Freddy Martinez, and Nathan "Nash" Sheard. Freddy is currently a policy analyst with the nonpartisan government accountability coalition Open The Government. Nash is an associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Freddy and Nash bring us up to speed on the explosive investigative report from the New York Times on the elusive facial recognition vendor, Clearview AI, which has scraped some three billion images for its database from social media platforms and sold them to law enforcement agencies for just $2,000 a month. We also explore the ways in which our personal information is being commodified and then sold back to as a part of wider surveillance capitalism; everything from the hottest security technology, like Ring, to software like Photoshop and everyday phone applications.
With help from Nash and Freddy, we unpack the feasibility of privacy legislation and how law enforcement organizations, like ICE, still manage to find legal ways to mine databases and use facial recognition technology with help from the world's leading tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Finally, we learn about active campaigns like the ACLU's "Press Pause" initiative that intend to help control the surge of facial recognition software and why an outright ban on this technology may be the safest way to protect our privacy.
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