The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

[The Larch]

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and "might lead to a dystopian future or something," a backer says.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That's greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump's 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, Google's 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 it's 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 company's 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 Clearview's — haven't been vetted by independent experts.

Clearview's 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 it's a valuable crime-solving tool.

"I've come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there's never going to be privacy," Mr. Scalzo said. "Laws have to determine what's legal, but you can't ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can't ban it."

Full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

[Valmy]

Dystopian future or something? Well I sure hope it is something.

[Syt]

Do you guys have anything to hide?

Please speak into this flower in my lapel.

[The Brain]

Is it helping law enforcement to do something illegal? Then the problem isn't the company.

[DGuller]

Sometimes I wonder whether police having more powers increases or decreases abuse.  One thing that I heard mentioned repeatedly about the Japanese legal system is that police abuse is widespread because police have little powers to investigate crimes, so convictions are hard to get without suspects' cooperation.  Maybe if police could solve crimes just by asking google, they would be less tempted to do things get people they "know" are guilty convicted.

[Barrister]

I had a case using facial recognition software.  Someone goes in to get a new drivers license, it comes back as flagged that person already has a drivers license under a different name.

This tech is very good, but it's not absolutely perfect.  As such it hasn't been accepted in court yet as expert evidence.  As such if you get a match all it does is give you a new suspect to investigate.  You still have to go out and get other hard evidence in order to make out a charge.

[HisMajestyBOB]

That's true as long as you scrupulous adhere to due process and rule of law.

[grumbler]

That's true as long as you scrupulous adhere to due process and rule of law.

Is this true whether you scrupulous your grammar or not?

[HisMajestyBOB]

That's true as long as you scrupulous adhere to due process and rule of law.

Is this true whether you scrupulous your grammar or not?

As long as I am consistently, there's no problem.

On the thread topic, there are apparently Twitter rumors and a lawsuit alleging the Clearview AI founder supports white supremacists and has explored making its data available to "allow a white supremacist to conduct what they call 'extreme opposition research.'"

Troublingly if truly.

[viper37]

On the thread topic, there are apparently Twitter rumors and a lawsuit alleging the Clearview AI founder supports white supremacists and has explored making its data available to "allow a white supremacist to conduct what they call 'extreme opposition research.'"

Troublingly if truly.

Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That's Not True.

Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that says it's amassed a database of billions of photos, has a fantastic selling point it offers up to police departments nationwide: It cracked a case of alleged terrorism in a New York City subway station last August in a matter of seconds. "How a Terrorism Suspect Was Instantly Identified With Clearview," read the subject line of a November email sent to law enforcement agencies across all 50 states through a crime alert service, suggesting its technology was integral to the arrest.

It's a compelling pitch that has helped rocket Clearview to partnerships with police departments across the country. But there's just one problem: The New York Police Department said that Clearview played no role in the case.

As revealed to the world in a startling story in the New York Times this weekend, Clearview AI has crossed a boundary that no other tech company seemed willing to breach: building a database of what it claims to be more than 3 billion photos that can be used to identify a person in almost any situation. It's raised fears that a much-hyped moment, when universal facial recognition could be deployed at a mass scale, is finally at hand.

But the company, founded by CEO Hoan Ton-That, has drawn a veil over itself and its operations, misrepresenting its work to police departments across the nation, hiding several key facts about its origins, and downplaying its founders' previous connections to white nationalists and the far right.

As it emerges from the shadows, Clearview is attempting to convince law enforcement that its facial recognition tool, which has been trained on photos scraped from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other websites, is more accurate than any other on the market. However, emails, presentations, and flyers obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that its claims to law enforcement agencies are impossible to verify — or flat-out wrong.

For example, the pitch email about its role in catching an alleged terrorist, which BuzzFeed News obtained via a public records request last month, explained that when the suspect's photo was "searched in Clearview," its software linked the image to an online profile with the man's name in less than five seconds. Clearview AI's website also takes credit in a flashy promotional video, using the incident, in which a man allegedly placed rice cookers made to look like bombs, as one example among thousands in which the company assisted law enforcement. But the NYPD says this account is not true.

[...]

It's from Buzzfeed.