A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
July 31, 2023
New York Times reporter Hill’s disquieting debut investigates the dangers posed by tech startup Clearview AI, whose search engine can scan a photo of a person’s face and sift through billions of online images to find other photos of that person, often with identifying information, such as social media accounts. The author portrays Clearview as insidious yet goofy, sometimes simultaneously (coder-in-chief Hoan Ton-That once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song in support of alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos), and follows the company as it woos venture capital and fends off government regulators. Highlighting how powerful Clearview’s technology has become since it began in 2017, even when working with images of individuals captured in dim light or at odd angles, Hill relates the case of an unidentified child abuser who was tracked down by detectives after Clearview’s software found his visage in the background of a crowd photo on Instagram, where “his face would have been half as big as your fingernail.” While Clearview publicly declared they “would work only with police,” reports that they’ve continued courting corporate clients raises dystopian concerns, Hill argues, describing how Madison Square Garden used a different company’s facial recognition technology to bar from the arena lawyers involved in lawsuits against the venue’s owners. Combining vivid reportage with a chilling overview of facial recognition technology’s capabilities, this unnerves.