Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet.
.” And so that’s how they got introduced to the New York Police Department. loved it, and lots of officers there started secretly using it. This shocked me that police can just essentially get this unvetted tool from some random company and download it to their phones and just start using it in active investigations. But that’s what happened. And Clearview gave them free trials. They told their friends, other departments. All of a sudden, the Department of Homeland Security is getting access to it and officers around the world.