The New York Times journalist offers a chilling narrative about the inner workings of a secretive startup in her book Your Face Belongs to Us
Kashmir Hill, The New York Times Journalist and author of Your Face Belongs to Us
There is a startup called Clearview AI, which counts billionaires Peter Thiel and Naval Ravikant as investors, and uses facial recognition technology in dangerous ways. Ways that even big tech companies like Google and Facebook refused to adopt. The perils of using such technology in unethical ways are many, but when such startups work with law enforcement, like Clearview AI is doing at present, it can even become a get out of jail free card, says journalist Kashmir Hill.
In her new book, Your Face Belongs to Us, Hill captures the making of this startup and its inner workings. She narrates how Clearview AI, which has a database of 30 billion faces, has been used by powerful people, like Sequoia Capital MD Doug Leone, football quarterback Joe Montana and actor Ashton Kutcher, and how indiscriminate use of such technology can mark the end of privacy as we know it.
She was on Forbes India’s From the Bookshelves podcast. Edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q. Your book is about this startup called Clearview AI that’s into facial recognition technology. You just have to upload a photograph of a person in it and it will show you results scraped from every presence that individual might have on the internet. Can you tell us more about this startup? Who are the people behind it, what’s the scope and scale?
I was surprised to find that when they first started, they were a very tiny startup, really just a rag-tag crew of a mix of individuals interested in technology and business, and just trying to find a new angle to make money. The technical co-founder is this guy named Hoan Ton-That. He grew up in Australia, dropped out of college at 19 to move to San Francisco, and try and make his way in the tech world. [He] eventually wound up in New York, where he met his co-founders for Clearview AI. They have scraped 30 billion faces on the internet. So they have quite a large database, which, of course, is more people than that live on the planet. So they have a number of photos of each person.