YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US
A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
A New York Times tech reporter delivers an exposé of the frightening possibilities of a new facial-recognition technology company.
In January 2020, Hill published an article in the Times bringing Clearview AI to public scrutiny as an exceedingly secretive startup company that could identify everything about a person’s life based on a photograph. Regarded previously as a “dystopian technology that most people associated only with science fiction novels or movies such as Minority Report,” facial recognition has proven exciting to many law enforcement agencies and terrifying to privacy-conscious citizens. Working on a tip in late 2019 about claims by Clearview’s high-profile lawyer, Paul Clement, formerly solicitor general under George W. Bush, Hill learned that more than 200 law enforcement agencies “were already using the tool,” and “the company had hired a fancy lawyer to reassure officers that they weren’t committing a crime by doing so.” The author partially chronicles the history about the company, started by a “ragtag crew with rightward leanings”—namely, Vietnamese Australian technophile Hoan Ton-That and conservative troll Chuck Johnson. Drawing on outdated theories of physiognomy and “genetic determinism,” as well as similar surveillance technology then developing in China and Russia, Clearview originally called the technology smartcheckr.com, “a tool that could theoretically identify and root out extreme liberals.” Indiana State Police became its first official customers in 2019, with many others to follow, including the Department of Homeland Security. Hill underscores the danger of misidentification and the huge ethical ramifications for a company “willing to cross a line that other technology companies feared, for good reason.” Due to the pandemic, she was unable to pursue this technology in Russia and China, which makes the book feel incomplete. Still, the author provides a solid foundation for further investigative digging.
Though not fully fleshed, a haunting portrait of sci-fi darkness in the real world.