A letter to the editor, from the desk of Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, lately of the river, now of the rental listing
To the Editor:
Sir —
I have in my time been shown a great many remarkable machines, and have found that the more remarkable the machine, the more modestly its inventor will describe how it came to be. So I want to begin by giving the gentleman credit for his candor.
A firm called Graylark Technologies, whose product is now named Raven and was formerly named GeoSpy, has built a contrivance that will take a photograph, any photograph, of the inside of a room and tell you the house it was taken in. It does not consult the little label that cameras attach to their pictures. It does not look the picture up to see where else it appears. It examines the room itself, the washer and the dryer, the tile and the light, and names the building. In the company’s own demonstrations it took a snapshot of a laundry appliance and located the very rental in Charlotte, North Carolina, quoting the advertisement. It took a bathroom from somebody’s social media and delivered the beach house, in Montecito, on the sand.
The proprietor, a Mr. Heinen, has been very forthcoming about how this was achieved, and I will tell you, for it is the best part. He did not set out to do it. The machine learned to do it on its own, like a child who is sent to school to learn his letters and comes home having picked the lock on the pantry. He says that in testing he happened to feed it a photograph of his sweetheart taking a picture of herself in a bathroom. The machine, to his surprise, put a pin in San Francisco. He took pictures from Zillow, a house-selling concern, and in nine cases out of ten it named the right city. By his own account this was, to use his language, an “oh, shoot” moment, though I am paraphrasing his vocabulary for the benefit of the Sunday edition.
I confess that I find this honest, and I find it frightening, and I find that the one does not cancel the other.
Now I wish to be fair, which at my age is mostly a matter of habit. The company says its tool is meant for investigators working on cases of trafficking and exploitation, where a photograph of a room might be the only thing standing between a child and wherever she is being kept. I would not wave that away for the price of a column. If a machine can take a frightened victim’s picture and say, “This is the third floor of a certain hotel,” then it has done a thing worth doing, and I should be a poor sort of humanitarian to say otherwise.
But I have lived long enough to notice what becomes of a power that is justified by its noblest purpose. It is rarely kept to it. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, one of the customers, has remarked that its use of the product has been limited and largely exploratory, and that it has produced no significant breakthrough nor arrest. I admire the sheriff’s modesty. I would only suggest that a tool which has not, so far, caught anybody, is a curious thing to build an arsenal around. And I am reminded that when the machine was first released to the public, some of the visitors to the company’s chatting room asked for help in stalking women, and that the company shut the gate only a day after a newspaper called. A gate that is closed upon the reporter’s inquiry is a gate that might have been closed before.
There is, besides, the matter of where the pictures come from. The house-sellers and the rental firms, the Zillows and the Airbnbs, have said, each in their way, that they did not agree to this and that their terms forbid the scraping of their listings. I am told Airbnb has no dealings with the company and is looking into it. That is the sort of response a man gives when somebody has been helping himself to his orchard and he has only just been informed.
Whether any of this offends the Fourth Amendment I leave to the lawyers, whose business it is to be confused in an orderly fashion. The Constitution promises that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. What it did not foresee, being written in a time when a person’s house was a place and not a photograph, is that the house might be identified, and found, and located on a map, because someone in a rental once posted a picture of the washing machine.
It may be that the machine’s demonstrations flatter it, and that in a real room, on a real Tuesday, it is not so clever. I hope so. I would simply say that a technology which can pick a bathroom out of a million, and which was not taught to, is the kind of thing a free people ought to talk about before it is in every sheriff’s drawer, and not after.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, and, for the record, I have never taken a photograph of my bathroom)