In November 2019, the New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill received a tip that seemed “too outrageous to be true”. Freddy Martinez, an analyst at Open the Government, a pro-transparency non-profit, had passed her a legal memo he had unearthed about a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone based on a snapshot of their face. Clearview had already sold its services to hundreds of police departments around the US but had tried to keep its existence secret.
Clearview might have flown under the radar a little longer had this memo landed in the lap of a less dogged reporter, but Hill – who describes her beat as “the looming tech dystopia, and how we can try to avoid it” – isn’t one to give up. The first part of her book, Your Face Belongs to Us, is a gripping account of how she uncovered the identity of Clearview’s founders and confirmed that its claims weren’t just hype. The company’s facial recognition abilities were alarmingly advanced and indeed have the potential to completely undermine privacy as we know it. A despot could use Clearview to identify protesters in a crowd. A stalker could take a photo of a woman at a bar and use Clearview to instantly discover her name, her social media accounts, and quite possibly her place of work or home address.
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