AS HEARD ON NH Today WGIR-AM 610: Anti-Trust Legislation for Big Tech and Facial Recognition

Welcome,

Craig Peterson here. I was on with Chris Ryan on NH Today. We talked about some of the misguided legislation being pushed by Amy Klobacher regarding big tech with her regulatory solution to anti-trust.  Then we got into Facial recognition and expose.ai. Here we go with Chris. 

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- CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Now we also see that many other companies have entered into that marketplace without our permission to use our faces. So if you want to check right now, this is a great thing that the New York Times did. They have exposed this a little bit, but go to exposing.ai. Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced some legislation to try and hold big tech a little bit more accountable.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with her approach. Also, we talked about an article in New York about facial recognition and some of the things we're doing that we probably shouldn't be doing. So here we go with Mr. Chris Ryan.

Chris Ryan: [00:00:44] Joining us right now in the program is Craig Peterson from Tech Talk you hear on Saturdays at 11:30 AM. Craig, how are you?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:52] Hey, good morning. Doing well

Chris Ryan: [00:00:54] Appreciate you joining us for the show.

I want to talk to you a little about some of the legislation I was reading from Amy Klobuchar, as she looks to get anti-trust legislation to take away some of the security of entities like Facebook and other large tech companies. It doesn't appear there's a tremendous amount of appetite for this type of antitrust legislation at this point. In your view, does there need to be a look at this?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:22] Yeah, there's two different sides to this whole anti-trust activity. Of course, it had started way back in the 18 hundreds. Then you had all of these massive barrons, and they wanted to stop them from controlling the economy effectively is what they were doing at the time.

Now we're looking at these almost oligarchs. We've got these people running these huge corporations like Facebook and Google, and Amazon, although there's been a bit of a shakeup at Amazon. Those guys and gals have an incredible amount of market power. That's one side of it. We understand that because if there's no competition, we're not going to be able to get a good value for our dollar.

The other side of that is how about if there's really only one buyer for your goods? You've got the one side where there's only one seller of particular interest, but what if there's one buyer. We see that more and more, particularly with companies like Amazon.

People complained about Walmart with that years ago. When Walmart just had such a monopoly and frankly still does in many cases. Walmart beats their suppliers over the head and shoulders to get the price down to a point where the supplier basically can't support it anymore. 

What we're looking at now is a situation we haven't had in a long time.  She's looking at having more and more regulations, adding more regulators to the various entities and the federal government that regulate business.

I look at this as saying I've had so many friends who have been destroyed their businesses that are destroyed by these big tech companies and their market manipulation to drive competitors out of business. That really bothers me.

I see a real big problem here because we do not allow the big guys to fail anymore. There's this concept of too big to fail. When we're talking about a free market, the idea is, if you want to buy some other companies, knock yourself out, but you're going to reach a point where you are not going to be able to afford to survive anymore. We've seen that many times look at the car industry.

We've seen bailouts now twice of Chrysler in my life as well as GM. There are serious problems with having more and more regulations because it will make it difficult for more competition to enter the market. That could potentially drive these big guys out of business. That's where I really start getting concerned.

Chris Ryan: [00:03:59] We focus a lot here in this segment about how, whether it's Facebook or other social media mechanisms and the usage of our phones as well, that we're spying on ourselves. It's a fascinating article in the New York Times last week. Actually, I think it was the weekend before, about facial recognition systems being used on our phones. What are they, and how are they used?

Craig Peterson: [00:04:21] There are a few companies out there you've probably heard of. I've talked about Clearview before, which is this clearview.ai company. This computer vision for a safer world. I love the way they put this. Actually couldn't have written it any better.

Clearview has raped all of our pictures on the internet. What that means is any publicly available picture, Clearview downloaded and started to look at. We also see that many other companies have entered into that marketplace without our permission to use our faces.

If you want to check right now, and this is a great thing that the New York times did, they've exposed this a little bit, but go to exposing.ai. Online, exposing.ai as artificial intelligence. It'll let you check to see if the photos you uploaded to flicker are now being sold and used online.

Our faces. We are uploading our Pictures. We're getting these free photo services, but all your photos on flicker, back in the day, nowadays upload them to Amazon photos or Google photos or Apple photos.

We know Apple does not make money off of our personal information. Google sure does and so do some of these others.  If you go to exposing.ai, you can type in your flicker username or a photo URL that it'll compare. It'll show you if they're using the pictures that you posted for facial recognition systems.

This is where we're starting to see arrests coming out of Washington, DC. Where they are scanning the internet for photos or using companies like Clearview and others. We even have had the FBI issue, a legal document here. I don't remember exactly how far I got along the line. The FBI using a big photo that they found online that had been doctored.

Is your face online? Are they using it for nefarious purposes? Like this guy who ended up getting charged by the FBI for this January in Washington, DC, and he had nothing to do with it.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:39] Craig, as always appreciate you joining us for the show. I look forward to chatting again next week.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:43] All right. Take care. Chris.

Chris Ryan: [00:06:44] Craig Peterson, joining us here in New Hampshire today from Tech Talk. You hear at Saturday's on news radio 610 and 96.7 at 11:30 AM.

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