John Oliver Explains Why Facial Recognition Technology Is More Dangerous Than Ever

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver turned his attention to the increasingly widespread use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. Heavily citing Kashmir Hill's investigation of Clearview AI in the New York Times, Oliver explained how a then little-known company created a groundbreaking app where users can take a picture of a person, upload it, and cross-reference it against 3 billion images that the company has scraped from Facebook, Twitter, Venmo, and other websites. Since Hill's investigation was published, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others have sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview for violating the websites' terms of service. Still, the company maintains that harvesting the personal information of millions for a secretive database is within the company's First Amendment rights. "You might as well argue that you have an Eighth Amendment right to dress up rabbits like John Lennon," Oliver said.