The frightening thing about Clearview is not that it works, and it’s not that we rely on them to not sell to bad actors.

Today’s episode of The Daily makes clear that its founders are not especially gifted at image recognition. They were not the top talents in this field. These are script kiddies who grabbed tons of data and implemented freely available methods and algorithms to build a terrifying product.

Scraping is not an advantage— any government (or private) actor can easily construct the same database. Training their dataset requires the know-how to implement published models and algorithms, which is not a unique enough skill to protect us.

We need to move past attempts to stop our technology from invading our privacy in this way– we’re way too late– and move on to finding ways to protect ourselves given this new reality.

We all need to adjust our threat models to assume our faces and photos are public and easy to access for anyone who wants to target us as individuals. Adopt new laws, policy, and personal security practices for this world.