Agents of mass surveillance
Companies can now affordably give every potential hire a very deep background check
Mass surveillance isn’t just for governments. And it’s not always bad.
Credit agencies, for instance, have long collected more information about Americans than perhaps any other entities, at least officially. If you are a borrower or renter with a proven track record of paying your bills on time, this is a good thing: It means lenders are willing to offer you lower interest rates.
Companies that offer background checks for employers often combine credit reports with other publicly and commercially available data to build an even more complete picture of you. If you are an upstanding, law-abiding candidate, this, too, is a good thing: It means employers are more willing to hire you for sensitive roles. This is also good for people who might be harmed when the wrong people are put in positions of trust — like sex offenders in a classroom, or drug offenders in an aircraft maintenance hangar.
But where should we draw the line? An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday pointed out that AI is making it affordable to do deep background checks even for ordinary hires. For large employers, and especially for the screening companies they might outsource this work to, this could mean a lot of people being surveilled intensely and regularly.
Do we want (for example) a coffee shop chain digging up the Reddit posts and OnlyFans pages of would-be baristas in search of anything that others might later use to embarrass the company on social media? Even if it has no bearing on the work and poses no danger to customers? Is that a good thing?
Before you think, “Oh, but someone’s Reddit posts and OnlyFans photos are probably under anonymous usernames,” this is the kind of privacy AI excels at stripping away, through methodical use of facial recognition and by cross-referencing venues where someone might have used the same screen name alongside personally identifiable information.
Putting AI to this sort of work is not illegal. This is believed to be why Anthropic didn’t think the Pentagon’s contract language around “all lawful uses” provided sufficient protection against mass domestic surveillance.
If you thought your government was unlocking your private online life, you would rightly feel like your freedom of expression was in jeopardy, and would probably dial back your opinions accordingly.
But what if it’s your present and future employers with the electron microscope? Will you retreat from online spaces, or play the part of someone more conforming?
People have been rightly concerned that a growing fraction of accounts we interact with online are actually bots. Do we now need to worry that, even in our anonymous spaces, the shrinking fraction of real people will become bots, roleplaying the ideal workers they think their employers will want to see?
I expect this will only get worse. The more capable AI gets, the more everyone’s past and private embarrassments become discoverable. With this awareness, you can feel the speech-chilling effect of tomorrow’s AIs today! (You’re welcome?)
Before you run out to sanitize your digital trail, you should know that you might just be trading one problem for another. As that Wall Street Journal article points out, AIs can already notice when someone’s digital footprint is too sparse and clean — and therefore suspicious.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.