Finding Chris Soderquist
We’ve been working on Systems Thinking lately (see this post and this one). If found a good not-too-technical explanation put out by the CDC, but it really irritated me that, though the presented the speaker as a SME (Subject Matter Expert), they did not identify him or give any attribution. He could have just been a model-for-hire reading from a script.
So I decided to find this guy. I grabbed a quick down-and-dirty screen shot from the video and searched Google for “facial recognition search”. I ended up on PimEyes, a Polish company that sells matches from pictures you upload to sites the feature the same face. After uploading my screenshot, I had instant results. I didn’t feel like paying $29.99 to see the full results, so I extrapolated one of the URLs from “https://thesystemth…” to “https://thesystemsthinker.com” and quickly found the same picture on an author profile for Chris Soderquist, a systems thinking consultant from the Atlanta area.
As as I executing this hack, I had a kind of scary feeling about all the data out there and how easy it is for machines and human actors to use it. This is a feeling I have quite a bit as the Digital Age approaches with hurricane force and our leaders seem paralyzed to either call to evacuate or to batten down the hatches. At this point, I guess the only response is to try to be as savvy as possible and develop your own understanding of where this all should go and what the limits should be.
To that end, lets do two things:
- Grab a photo — either of someone you know or someone you don’t — and go to https://pimeyes.com. Upload the photo and take a look at what it finds. Did it return a match? If so, what can you learn about the person pictured (by guess URLs)?
- What do you think? Does this technology excite you or alarm you, or both? Where could you see this going wrong? What could be good applications? If this is going to happen anyway, what should our response be? Fight to take down our images from the Internet? Demand governments control how this power is used?
I find this creepy and threatening to think that anyone can just find me one by getting my pic.
If you’ve seen civil war you should know that winter soldier was wrongly accused of setting a bomb when they used facial recognition technology to identify the bomber.
Facial recognition technology is already being used by law enforcement, but there a numerious problems with the technology. For example, several studies, including those done by the government themselves, have proven that the software is inherently racist. See https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/20/79/ai-face-recognition-racist-us-government-nist-study/
That’s just wrong.
We have been discussing limits for our family. Not sure where the boundary lines will be drawn exactly, but I’m pretty sure anything artificial will be out. We like to think of ourselves as organic, though sometimes sweets are ok if Suzy is making them 😆🥰
On a more serious note, we don’t use facial passwords or scan our faces in any devices, haven’t taken Dna data tests, and don’t have Alexa. I’m sure our phones are already collecting enough data. I am praying about whether to enter the meta.
This is something community should begin to discern. How much intrusion of cybernetic technology is too much? When does it empower people and when does it extract their sovereignty? I imagine Jesus can enter the meta, still true to himself, so that he can connect with human lives there — after all, he was able to preach to the spirits in prison after the cross. But we should not dare to walk anywhere without him and his leading.