The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-secretive-company-that-might-end-privacy-as-we-know-it/ar-BBZ57OT?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=hplocalnews
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...that surveillance capitalism is already extant and progressing. That's not new. It is not going to stop and it is only going to improve.
"Privacy? Privacy? We don't need no stinkin' privacy." Relax, it's just a hive mind collective merging thing 
Democracy as an exposed and constantly watched product? I don't think that would work out and we have to wonder who will be watching.
In Star Trek, TNG, there are the BORG. (Big Organization?) who are a collective with a "queen" so to speak. They are not autonomous beings and are connected constantly to the collective and only act on its behalf. The BORG assimilate other cultures into their collective as they travel the Universe and are pretty much unstoppable, (well, you know, we can be crafty). The say, "We are the BORG! You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile!" And it it pretty much is. That's quite a good metaphor for what may await us in some way or another.
Shoshana Zuboff has been researching it and offers a rather startling primer on the whole thing:
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism
