When she replies asking for his number, he ghosts her. In one of several twists that make the book read like a thriller, an acquaintance on Facebook – someone she had added as a friend years earlier – messages her to say he had heard she was trying to find out about Clearview and could he help. She received no response from the lawyer who had written the memo, or by tracing and contacting Clearview’s investors, among them Peter Thiel. On LinkedIn she found one Clearview employee, a sales manager named “John Good” who had a skimpy CV and only two connections. The physical address listed at the bottom of the website did not exist. When Hill checked the Clearview website in November 2019 it revealed only a simple logo, the tagline “Artificial intelligence for a better world”, and a form to request access, which she completed to no avail. A stalker could take a photo of a woman at a bar and use Clearview to instantly discover her name, her social media accounts, and quite possibly her place of work or home address. A despot could use Clearview to identify protesters in a crowd. The company’s facial recognition abilities were alarmingly advanced and indeed have the potential to completely undermine privacy as we know it. The first part of her book, Your Face Belongs to Us, is a gripping account of how she uncovered the identity of Clearview’s founders and confirmed that its claims weren’t just hype. Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook had refrained from releasing Clearview-style facial recognition technology because it was deemed too dangerous and easily abused. Freddy Martinez, an analyst at Open the Government, a pro-transparency non-profit, had passed her a legal memo he had unearthed about a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone based on a snapshot of their face.Ĭlearview had already sold its services to hundreds of police departments around the US but had tried to keep its existence secret.Ĭlearview might have flown under the radar a little longer had this memo landed in the lap of a less dogged reporter, but Hill – who describes her beat as “the looming tech dystopia, and how we can try to avoid it” – isn’t one to give up. In November 2019, The New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill received a tip that seemed “too outrageous to be true”.
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