Way back in the early 2Ks, someone must have reported my Facebook account called "Dabitch", as Facebook came demanding a scan of my government-issued ID or passport. My response was to delete the entire account and everything in it with a "cleanout" script. Under no circumstances do I trust US companies with my passport images. You know how you're just supposed to look straight ahead and have a neutral face for your passport photo? That's how AI maps your features to store them in a database.
Now the social app formerly known as Twitter, X, wants you to verify your identity by uploading your ID. If this becomes a requirement, my account will be script-deleted so that I can remove as much data as a user possibly can. I've already removed the app from my phone, as it tracks my location that way, I no longer trust the opt-out setting on that.
There are many reasons I think this is a terrible idea. With the GDPR in Europe, X might be banned there. Elon Musk has a lofty goal with X, he wants to turn it into the "one" app that does everything.
Think about your data habits, and what you are storing about yourself in other people's databases. Zuckerberg's Facebook knows all of your friends and family. Bezos knows what you buy, what you watch, and everything you eat if you shop at Wholefoods - and Amazon cloud stores millions of companies' data as well as the US military's.
Now X wants to become the one app for everything. That sounds like a digital ID to me. Twitter already has your voice if you participated in any spaces, now they want your face. Musk stores data outside of the GDPR, so he can ignore all data protection rules.
So what's so scary about one app that can also be used as an ID to log in with say, facial recognition at the NHS? That's not the freaky part, it's the combination of everything. Twitter is where users voice their political opinions, engage in debates, announce their dislikes, vent, and more often than not they do so with their qualifications, job titles, and companies that they work for in their bio. Clearview.ai has over 100 billion images in its database, and a whole bunch of those were illegally collected.
Faulty facial recognition has already gotten Uber Eats drivers fired in the UK, and facial recognition is used as a surveillance tool of Palestinians in Israel. Private use of facial recognition, by institutions and even individuals, poses just as much of a threat to the future of human civilization as government use.
Now, Bezos, Musk, and, his buddy Pieter Theil are also heavily invested in funding Quantum Computing as well. Google has already announced new algorithm that makes FIDO encryption safe from quantum computers, but it's safe to say this is a now a digital arms race.
I had a hunch that Musk was going to do something strange, so I luckily deleted a large portion of my past Twitter history with an app before he locked the API down. Now that those apps no longer work, people who have been on Twitter since it began have their entire Twitter history in this man's hands. While I only have 2000 posts to manually remove.
You can find me on Keybase, on Telegram (if you know my number), and on Discord as .dabitch but not as frequently on X anymore. I've even removed my face from the profile pic.
