My source had unearthed a legal memo marked “Privileged & Confidential” in which a lawyer for Clearview had said that the company had scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to create a revolutionary app. It was the end of a long day and I was tired but the email gave me a jolt. I was in a hotel room in Switzerland, six months pregnant, when I got the email. In November 2019, I had just become a reporter at The New York Times when I got a tip that seemed too outrageous to be true: A mysterious company called Clearview AI claimed it could identify just about anyone based only on a snapshot of their face. The following is an excerpt looking at the beginning of Hill’s investigation into the facial recognition company. In her book, “ Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It,” Hill describes her reporting journey, including going inside Clearview AI itself and talking to its leaders. It is still widely used by law enforcement. In 2022, the startup settled a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union after the latter alleged it violated an Illinois privacy law, and as part of the settlement, Clearview AI’s database cannot be accessed by private entities such as businesses and individuals. And while it has run afoul of privacy regulations outside the U.S., Clearview AI hasn’t seen as much regulatory oversight domestically. Today, the company has a database of 30 billion faces. Yet the tip did turn out to be true, at least in terms of how many faces it had collected. And it was selling a facial recognition app to police that it said could identify somebody with something like 99% accuracy.” “It was this company, Clearview AI, that claimed to have scraped billions of photos from the public internet, without people’s consent, to build a database of something like a billion photos. “I didn’t think it could be true,” Hill said. When New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill first got a tip in 2019 about a facial recognition startup, she found it hard to believe.
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