Until recently, Hoan Ton-Thats greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trumps distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That an Australian techie and onetime model did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Googles chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used in a very bad way. Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And its not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
The weaponization possibilities of this are endless, said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The companys one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named John Good, turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police including Clearviews havent been vetted by independent experts.
Clearviews app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.
The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it. And he said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app flags possible anomalous search behavior in order to prevent users from conducting what it deemed inappropriate searches.
In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
Another early investor is a small firm called Kirenaga Partners. Its founder, David Scalzo, dismissed concerns about Clearview making the internet searchable by face, saying its a valuable crime-solving tool.
Ive come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, theres never going to be privacy, Mr. Scalzo said. Laws have to determine whats legal, but you cant ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you cant ban it. ... Police departments have had access to facial recognition tools for almost 20 years, but they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images, such as mug shots and drivers license photos. In recent years, facial recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of images.
Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of peoples faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition.
Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a state-of-the-art neural net to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry like how far apart a persons eyes are. Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into neighborhoods. When a user uploads a photo of a face into
Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearviews database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.
They put surveillance cameras too high, Mr. Ton-That lamented. The angle is wrong for good face recognition.
Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that rates the performance of facial recognition algorithms.
We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate, said Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown Universitys Center on Privacy and Technology, who has studied the governments use of facial recognition. The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgnger effect. Theyre talking about a massive database of random people theyve found on the internet.
But current and former law enforcement officials say the app is effective. For us, the testing was whether it worked or not, said Mr. Cohen, the former Indiana State Police captain.
One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. Thats because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users images Clearview is violating the sites terms of service.
A lot of people are doing it, Mr. Ton-That shrugged. Facebook knows.
Jay Nancarrow, a Facebook spokesman, said the company was reviewing the situation with Clearview and will take appropriate action if we find they are violating our rules.
Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebooks board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments.
Some law enforcement officials said they didnt realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearviews servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees wont look at the photos that the police upload.
Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the apps legality.
In an August memo that Clearview provided to potential customers, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office in Florida, Mr. Clement said law enforcement agencies do not violate the federal Constitution or relevant existing state biometric and privacy laws when using Clearview for its intended purpose.
Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities dont have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isnt the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The memo appeared to be effective; the Atlanta police and Pinellas County Sheriffs Office soon started using Clearview.
Because the police upload photos of people theyre trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see. After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearviews systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a software bug.
Its creepy what theyre doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math, said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. Absent a very strong federal privacy law, were all screwed.
Mr. Ton-That said his company used only publicly available images. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook so that search engines cant link to your profile, your Facebook photos wont be included in the database, he said.
But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin.
Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.
Weve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table, Mr. Hartzog said. I dont see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.
During a recent interview at Clearviews offices in a WeWork location in Manhattans Chelsea neighborhood, Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the app on himself. He took a selfie and uploaded it. The app pulled up 23 photos of him. In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered in what looks like blood.
Mr. Ton-That then took my photo with the app. The software bug had been fixed, and now my photo returned numerous results, dating back a decade, including photos of myself that I had never seen before. When I used my hand to cover my nose and the bottom of my face, the app still returned seven correct matches for me.
Police officers and Clearviews investors predict that its app will eventually be available to the public.
Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. Theres always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it, he said.
Ive come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, theres never going to be privacy, Mr. Scalzo said. Laws have to determine whats legal, but you cant ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you cant ban it.
Ive come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, theres never going to be privacy, Mr. Scalzo said. Laws have to determine whats legal, but you cant ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you cant ban it.
We're fucked
Just wait until always-on cameras are everywhere. Vehicles will probably have 360 degree video. Perhaps something like google glass will get popular given a better form factor. There will be surveillance everywhere all the time and government and corporations will be taking full advantage. ---
Nah, it's capitalism that is the mistake. CS majors enjoy doing neat things. Capitalists take those neat things and exploit them for profit. Unchecked capitalism tends to turn into fascism. ---
Nah, it's capitalism that is the mistake. CS majors enjoy doing neat things. Capitalists take those neat things and exploit them for profit. Unchecked capitalism tends to turn into fascism.
