The A.I. “Gaydar” Study and the Real Dangers of Big Data

Photograph by Jochen Tack / Alamy

As if LGBT individuals did not already have enough to worry about when it comes to facing discrimination and bigotry, a new study claiming that it can use facial recognition computer programs to identify whether or not one is LGBT would seemingly add to the arsenal of bigoted employers who seek to make the lives of closeted employees even more of a living hell.  Other frightening uses: anti-gay religious affiliated colleges might decide to screen applicants; Christofascists parents seeking to determine whether they have a gay child; right wing churches screening members.  The list goes on and on. The other danger of the software is that it still has a significant margin of error so a goodly number of straights could find themselves incorrectly identified as gay.  The New Yorker looks at this dubious and possible dangerous study and its technology.  Here are excerpts:

In the twenty-first century, the face is a database, a dynamic bank of information points—muscle configurations, childhood scars, barely perceptible flares of the nostril—that together speak to what you feel and who you are. Facial-recognition technology is being tested in airports around the world, matching camera footage against visa photos. Churches use it to document worshipper attendance. China has gone all in on the technology, employing it to identify jaywalkers, offer menu suggestions at KFC, and prevent the theft of toilet paper from public restrooms. Michal Kosinski, an organizational psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the Guardian earlier this week. The photo of Kosinski accompanying the interview showed the face of a man beleaguered. Several days earlier, Kosinski and a colleague, Yilun Wang, had reported the results of a study, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggesting that facial-recognition software could correctly identify an individual’s sexuality with uncanny accuracy. The researchers culled tens of thousands of photos from an online-dating site, then used an off-the-shelf computer model to extract users’ facial characteristics—both transient ones, like eye makeup and hair color, and more fixed ones, like jaw shape. Then they fed the data into their own model, which classified users by their apparent sexuality. When shown two photos, one of a gay man and one of a straight man, Kosinski and Wang’s model could distinguish between them eighty-one per cent of the time; for women, its accuracy dropped slightly, to seventy-one per cent. Human viewers fared substantially worse. They correctly picked the gay man sixty-one per cent of the time and the gay woman fifty-four per cent of the time. “Gaydar,” it appeared, was little better than a random guess. The study immediately drew fire from two leading L.G.B.T.Q. groups, the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, for “wrongfully suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect sexual orientation.” They offered a list of complaints, which the researchers rebutted point by point. Yes, the study was in fact peer-reviewed. No, contrary to criticism, the study did not assume that there was no difference between a person’s sexual orientation and his or her sexual identity; some people might indeed identify as straight but act on same-sex attraction. “We assumed that there was a correlation . . . in that people who said they were looking for partners of the same gender were homosexual,” Kosinski and Wang wrote.
 True, the study consisted entirely of white faces, but only because the dating site had served up too few faces of color to provide for meaningful analysis. And that didn’t diminish the point they were making—that existing, easily obtainable technology could effectively out a sizable portion of society. To the extent that Kosinski and Wang had an agenda, it appeared to be on the side of their critics. As they wrote in the paper’s abstract, “Given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.” The objections didn’t end there. Some scientists criticized the study on methodological grounds. To begin with, they argued, Kosinski and Wang had used a flawed data set. Besides all being white, the users of the dating site may have been telegraphing their sexual proclivities in ways that their peers in the general population did not. . . . . Was the computer model picking up on facial characteristics that all gay people everywhere shared, or merely ones that a subset of American adults, groomed and dressed a particular way, shared?

Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, a pair of professors at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who run the blog Calling Bullshit, also took issue with Kosinski and Wang’s most ambitious conclusion—that their study provides “strong support” for the prenatal-hormone theory of sexuality, which predicts that exposure to testosterone in the womb shapes a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation in later life. In response to Kosinki and Wang’s claim that, in their study, “the faces of gay men were more feminine and the faces of lesbians were more masculine,” Bergstrom and West wrote, “we see little reason to suppose this is due to physiognomy rather than various aspects of self-presentation.” Regardless of the accuracy of the method, past schemes to identify gay people have typically ended in cruel fashion—pogroms, imprisonment, conversion therapy. The fact is, though, that nowadays a computer model can probably already do a decent job of ascertaining your sexual orientation, even better than facial-recognition technology can, simply by scraping and analyzing the reams of data that marketing firms are continuously compiling about you. Do gay men buy more broccoli than straight men, or do they buy less of it? Do they rent bigger cars or smaller ones? Who knows? Somewhere, though, a bot is poring over your data points, grasping for ways to connect any two of them. Therein lies the real worry. Last week, Equifax, the giant credit-reporting agency, disclosed that a security breach had exposed the personal data of more than a hundred and forty-three million Americans; company executives had been aware of the security flaw since late July but had failed to disclose it. (Three of them, however, had off-loaded some of their Equifax stock.) Earlier this week, ProPublica revealed that Facebook’s ad-buying system had enabled advertisers to target their messages at people with such interests as “How to burn jews” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world.’ ” The categories were created not by Facebook employees but by an algorithm—yet another way in which automated thinking can turn offensive. “The growing digitalization of our lives and rapid progress in AI continues to erode the privacy of sexual orientation and other intimate traits,” Kosinski and Wang wrote at the end of their paper. They continue, perhaps Pollyannaishly, “The postprivacy world will be a much safer and hospitable place if inhabited by well-educated, tolerant people who are dedicated to equal rights.” A piece of data itself has no positive or negative moral value, but the way we manipulate it does. It’s hard to imagine a more contentious project than programing ethics into our algorithms; to do otherwise, however, and allow algorithms to monitor themselves, is to invite the quicksand of moral equivalence.

I am not paranoid.  I am "out" socially and at work.  My most important client base knows I am gay and simply could care less.  Many gays, however are not so fortunate and many have good reason to want to stay in the closet at work given the utter lack of employment protections at the federal level and in 29 states, including Virginia.  

U.S. Mining Data From 9 Leading Internet Firm - Firms Deny Knowledge

The full scope of the police state like tactics of the U.S. Government's spying on American citizens continues to unfold and, in my view, ought to be very disturbing to those who value privacy and freedom.  Some will say "I have nothing to hide, and I don't care" but that mindset is missing the bigger issue: unless one is a suspect of criminal activities, your personal information and data should not be subject to scrutiny by the government or anyone else.  What we are seeing is that all of us under a level of scrutiny that makes the former Soviet Union's KGB look like a rant beginner in information gathering.  And it needs to be stressed that this program of domestic spying began under Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney not the Obama administration, although it is troubling that Obama has not ceased some of the worse abuses.  A Washington Post story looks at the fact that the situation with Verizon is merely the tip of the iceberg.  Here are highlights:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “I would just push back on the idea that the court has signed off on it, so why worry? This is a court that meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and publishes almost none of its opinions. It has never been an effective check on government.”

Several companies contacted by The Post said they had no knowledge of the program, did not allow direct government access to their servers and asserted that they responded only to targeted requests for information.

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Every police state has always claimed justification for spying on its citizens.  America has taken this nightmarish surveillance to frightening new levels.  I for one will not be sleeping better at night. 

Spying on Americans: NSA Asked Verizon for All Call Data

Click image to enlarge

Some have scoffed at the reality that in the United States personal privacy is a thing of the past.  While we face ridiculous lengths to access financial and healthcare records, the government is spying on our every move.  The map above is from a January, 2008 post shows that spying on citizens in America ranks up there with levels in China and Russia - that's right, this is from BEFORE Barack Obama was elected for those in the GOP base - and things have not improved over the intervening years as evidenced by a new story in the Washington Post about the NSA - National Security Administration - accessing all of Verizon's call records.  That's right, all of them, not just those of suspected would be terrorists.  Think you are having a private phone conversation?  Think again.   Here are highlights from the Post story (NOTE: it was a British paper that first broke the story):

The National Security Agency appears to be collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest phone companies, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The order appears to require a Verizon subsidiary to provide the NSA with daily information on all telephone calls by its customers within the United States and from foreign locations into the United States.

The order, which was signed by a judge from the secret court that oversees domestic surveillance, was first reported on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper. The Web site reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic.

If the document is genuine, it could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued. It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carriers under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

An expert in this aspect of the law said Wednesday night that the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.

The order falls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which authorizes the government to make broad demands on telephone carriers for information about calls. In this case, the order requires Verizon to provide “ongoing, daily” information about “all call detail records . . . created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad; or wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

The White House, the Justice Department and the FBI, which apparently sought the order, declined to comment. Spokesmen for Verizon and the court also declined to comment.

But civil liberties groups were quick to criticize the sweeping nature of the order.  “This is a truly stunning revelation,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “This suggests that the government has been compiling a comprehensive record of Americans’ associations and possibly even their whereabouts.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued the government over its surveillance prac­tices, said in a statement Wednesday night that the order “requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S. It also contains a gag order prohibiting Verizon from disclosing information about the order to anyone other than their counsel.”

The order also seems to confirm fears expressed by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.). In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last year, they said, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of . . . these secret court opinions. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

Government officials have defended the broad surveillance powers, saying that the information has been vital in uncovering and disrupting terrorist plots. They also say that the surveillance has operated under the provisions of the Patriot Act and other laws.

There's more, but the bottom line is that America is increasingly a police state and the trend began under Bush/Cheney and the then GOP controlled Congress.  This may shock the conspiracy crowd in the GOP, but it was their guys who put this system into motion.  I find it frightening.

Actress Jodie Foster Comes Out At Golden Globes

Ending years of rumors and speculation, Oscar winning actress Jodie Foster came out at the Golden Globe Awards last night after receiving the Cecil B. Demille award.  In a moving acceptance speech Foster explained her past reticence about giving up her privacy but stated that she felt the need to clarify maters at this point in her life.  I for one wish her well and hope that she finds additional peace and self-ease with the announcement behind her.  Living a secret of sorts become so exhausting and draining.  Huffington Post has details on Foster's announcement.  Here are excerpts:

Jodie Foster ended years of rampant media speculation when she casually came out of the closet while accepting her Cecil B. Demille award at the Golden Globes Sunday night. 

After being introduced by Robert Downey Jr., Foster coyly said, "While I’m here being all confessional, I just have the sudden urge to say something I’ve never been able to air in public. A declaration that I’m a little nervous about. Not quite as nervous as my publicist, huh, Jennifer? But uh, you know, I’m just going to put it out there. Loud and proud. I’m going to need your support. I am -- single!"

She then took a more serious turn, noting, "I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age. In those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends, and family, coworkers and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her."

Throughout her occasionally long-winded yet stirring speech, Foster, 50, went on to speak about privacy and its general absence in Hollywood -- a luxury that, to her, seems like a distant past.  .  .  .  .  ."If you had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you, too, would value privacy above all else."

Foster also thanked her ex-partner and co-parent, Cydney Bernard, and said she would only take projects that challenged her creatively -- which left a number of publications such as the Los Angeles Times to speculate whether or not the Oscar-winning actress was also announcing her retirement.

Again, I wish her well and hope she finds much happiness.  And I further hope that the gay will come when LGBT individuals will be viewed simply as people and that sick individuals like the professional Christian set who only feel self-satisfied when demonizing others will be viewed as the outcasts of society.

The Demise of Privacy in Face of Growing Surveillance

This report by US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International is a bit shocking in some ways, but not surprising in others. The USA, the self-styled land of liberty ranks right up there with police states when the privacy of its citizens is taken into consideration. Moreover, as shown by the map above (black denotes the poorest ranking), countries that have had the closest ties with the Chimperator over the last few years score poorly as well, the UK in particular. Here are some highlights:

Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection.

The most recent report published in 2007, available at http://www.privacyinternational.org/phr, is probably the most comprehensive single volume report published in the human rights field. The report runs over 1,100 pages and includes 6,000 footnotes. More than 200 experts from around the world have provided materials and commentary. The participants range from eminent privacy scholars to high-level officials charged with safeguarding constitutional freedoms in their countries. Academics, human rights advocates, journalists and researchers provided reports, insight, documents and advice.

Summary of key findings:

In terms of statutory protections and privacy enforcement, the US is the worst ranking country in the democratic world. In terms of overall privacy protection the United States has performed very poorly, being out-ranked by both India and the Philippines and falling into the "black" category, denoting endemic surveillance.

The worst ranking EU country is the United Kingdom, which again fell into the "black" category along with Russia and Singapore. However for the first time Scotland has been given its own ranking score and performed significantly better than England & Wales.

Argentina scored higher than 18 of the 27 EU countries.

For more details see: http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597

FBI prepares vast database of biometrics - $1 billion project to include images of irises and faces

I increasingly feel that the USA is moving towards a police state with the terror threat being used to push through spying and data gathering that would otherwise never be allowed. This MSNBC story (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22366208/) suggests that I am not just being paranoid in these fears. It is truly frightening how much information the government has on individuals that they do not even know exists (e.g., a prior post that looked at Homeland Security keep records on overseas travelers, include who they travel with and what type of beds they booked in hotel rooms). Soon we may all want to wear face coverings went outside of our homes. Here are some highlights:

CLARKSBURG, W. Va. - The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives.

And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a criminal out of a crowd.

At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI. Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.