Your Face Belongs to Us: AI, Privacy, and Surveillance

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched? These days, security cameras capture you on street corners, generative AI remembers things about you, and third-party cookies track you across the Internet. The library offers a number of resources that will help you understand more about these important topics.

In Means of Control, journalist Byron Tau explores how the U.S. government takes advantage of all the data collected about consumers on the Internet. “Recommendations” on social media feel eerily targeted and advertisements are specifically curated to your desires and purchasing behaviors. Beyond that, generative artificial intelligences such as ChatGPT, ClaudeAI, Google Gemini, and Grok are proliferating fast, with 62% of U.S. adults stating that they interact with generative AI at least once a week. In More Everything Forever, astrophysicist Adam Becker discusses how genAI companies and the billionaires who fund them do not always have our best interests in mind, valuing technological supremacy rather than prioritizing solving issues facing our world such as climate change and rising economic inequality. Finally, in Your Face Belongs to Us, journalist Kashmir Hill discusses how a facial recognition AI called Clearview AI has been used by law enforcement to make wrongful arrests in the U.S., showing that AI outputs are not always correct and can amplify existing systemic bias.

In some ways, the early 2010s TV series Person of Interest predicted our modern surveillance state and the budding AI apocalypse. Person of Interest was a science fiction crime drama created by Jonathan Nolan. The show follows a reclusive billionaire (“Harold Finch”) who builds an AI (“The Machine”) that can allegedly predict when someone is about to commit an act of terrorism. Wanting to help the government prevent another 9/11, Finch sells The Machine to the U.S. government for $1. The government hides The Machine in a data center, starts killing the people involved in its production, and sends assassins after the people on The Machine’s suspect list, taking them out without trial or questioning. It is only after his best friend is wrongfully killed that Finch realizes his grave error in judgment.

The Machine in Person of Interest synthesizes data from many sources such as online social media posts, NSA surveillance feeds, wiretaps, and NYPD security cameras in order to make its predictions. The Snowden revelations occurred in 2013, in which Edward Snowden revealed to the public that the NSA was indeed spying on the American people in the name of national security—two years after Person of Interest started airing. In Means of Control, published in 2024, Tau writes about how tech companies and the government collaborate to surveil the American public, citing NSA technologies such as PRISM which were exposed in the Snowden disclosures. In Your Face Belongs to Us, published in 2023, Hill writes that AI companies utilize pictures posted on social media such as Facebook to train their AI models. In later seasons, Person of Interest explores what can happen when data collection goes unchecked, the dangers of uninhibited artificial intelligence in the hands of the state, the dangers of privacy violations, the right to fair trial, and the respect for free will—all exceedingly relevant topics in our current information age.

In a surveilled world where streaming has taken over, embracing physical media such as CDs and DVDs feels almost subversive. Your library doesn’t track your watch history or checkout history, meaning that your decisions remain your own and your privacy remains intact. Person of Interest is available on DVD through the Mercer County Library System, including a few special features discussing the topics mentioned above.

In the introduction of More Everything Forever, Becker quotes a 2021 tweet from entertainment writer Alex Blechman:

“Sci Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

Indeed, science fiction books and TV shows such as Person of Interest should be heeded as a warning, not a roadmap for creation. Artificial intelligence is a new and budding field, with limited guardrails and safety guidelines. We should govern carefully, lest we lose ourselves.

Further reading:

Permanent Record by Edward J Snowden - Call number: B SNO 2019

Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State by Byron Tau - Call number: 363.25 TAU 2024

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker - Call number: 658.514 BEC 2025

Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini - Call number: 006.3 BUO 2023

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff - Call number: 306.3 ZUB 2019

The Private is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Ray Brescia - Call number: 343.09 BRE 2025

The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States by Brian Hochman - Call number: 363.252 HOC 2022

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill - Call number: 006.2 HIL 2023

Photo by Michał Jakubowski on Unsplash

--Darya Tahvildar-Zadeh, West Windsor Branch