[liberationtech] The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

[Yosem Companys]

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know ItA little-known
startup 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 startup 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.”
Mr. Ton-That, 31, grew up a long way from Silicon Valley. In his native
Australia, he was raised on tales of his royal ancestors in Vietnam. In 2007, he
dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. The iPhone had just arrived,
and his goal was to get in early on what he expected would be a vibrant market
for social media apps. But his early ventures never gained real traction.

In 2009, Mr. Ton-That created a site that let people share links to videos with
all the contacts in their instant messengers. Mr. Ton-That shut it down after it
was branded a “phishing scam.” In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which added Mr.
Trump’s distinctive coif to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing program. Both
fizzled.
Dispirited, Mr. Ton-That moved to New York in 2016. Tall and slender, with long
black hair, he considered a modeling career, he said, but after one shoot he
returned to trying to figure out the next big thing in tech. He started reading
academic papers on artificial intelligence, image recognition and machine
learning.
Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan
Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an
impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the
editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two
soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That
would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up
commercial interest.
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 driver’s 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 people’s 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 person’s 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 Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then
shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with
the links to the sites from which those images came.
Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was
bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr.
Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”
Going Viral With Law Enforcement
By the end of 2017, the company had a formidable facial recognition tool, which
it called Smartcheckr. But Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That weren’t sure whom they
were going to sell it to.
Maybe it could be used to vet babysitters or as an add-on feature for
surveillance cameras. What about a tool for security guards in the lobbies of
buildings or to help hotels greet guests by name? “We thought of every idea,”
Mr. Ton-That said.
One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and
self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use
“unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a
document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the
company never actually offered such services.
The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law
enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from
outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among other things, Mr.
Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the
popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had been the subject of
negative articles by Gawker.
“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later
converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman.
“That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”
Even after a second funding round in 2019, Clearview remains tiny, having raised
$7 million from investors, according to Pitchbook, a website that tracks
investments in startups. The company declined to confirm the amount.
In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They
solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men had gotten into a
fight in a park, and it ended when one shot the other in the stomach. A
bystander recorded the crime on a phone, so the police had a still of the
gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s app.
They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had
posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He
did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he
wasn’t in government databases,” said Chuck Cohen, an Indiana State Police
captain at the time.
The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been
identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana
State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company.
(The police declined to comment beyond saying that they tested Clearview’s app.)
Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police
forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr.
Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials
aware of the tool, according to Mr. Ton-That. (“I’m thrilled to have the
opportunity to help Hoan build Clearview into a mission-driven organization
that’s helping law enforcement protect children and enhance the safety of
communities across the country,” Mr. Schwartz said through a spokeswoman.)
The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who
managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general.
Brandon Fricke, an N.F.L. agent engaged to the Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, said
in a financial disclosure report during a congressional campaign in California
that he was a “growth consultant” for the company. (Clearview said that it was a
brief, unpaid role, and that the company had enlisted Democrats to help market
its product as well.)
The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to
officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and
praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and
online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in
response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.

In July, a detective in Clifton, N.J., urged his captain in an email to buy the
software because it was “able to identify a suspect in a matter of seconds.”
During the department’s free trial, Clearview had identified shoplifters, an
Apple Store thief and a good Samaritan who had punched out a man threatening
people with a knife.
Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software,
without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email,
provided to The Times by two researchers, Beryl Lipton of MuckRock and Freddy
Martinez of Open the Government. They discovered Clearview late last year while
looking into how local police departments are using facial recognition.
According to a Clearview sales presentation reviewed by The Times, the app
helped identify a range of individuals: a person who was accused of sexually
abusing a child whose face appeared in the mirror of someone’s else gym photo;
the person behind a string of mailbox thefts in Atlanta; a John Doe found dead
on an Alabama sidewalk; and suspects in multiple identity-fraud cases at banks.
In Gainesville, Fla., Detective Sgt. Nick Ferrara heard about Clearview last
summer when it advertised on CrimeDex, a listserv for investigators who
specialize in financial crimes. He said he had previously relied solely on a
state-provided facial recognition tool, FACES, which draws from more than 30
million Florida mug shots and Department of Motor Vehicle photos.

Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide
database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm
doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.
“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said.
“A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or
partial view of their face.”
He uploaded his own photo to the system, and it brought up his Venmo page. He
ran photos from old, dead-end cases and identified more than 30 suspects. In
September, the Gainesville Police Department paid $10,000 for an annual
Clearview license.
Federal law enforcement, including the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland
Security, are trying it, as are Canadian law enforcement authorities, according
to the company and government officials.
Despite its growing popularity, Clearview avoided public mention until the end
of 2019, when Florida prosecutors charged a woman with grand theft after two
grills and a vacuum were stolen from an Ace Hardware store in Clermont. She was
identified when the police ran a still from a surveillance video through
Clearview, which led them to her Facebook page. A tattoo visible in the
surveillance video and Facebook photos confirmed her identity, according to an
affidavit in the case.
‘We’re All Screwed’Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the
photos in Clearview’s 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 University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, who has
studied the government’s use of facial recognition. “The larger the database,
the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect.
They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve 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. That’s
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 Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow
declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments.
Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded
were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to
pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says
its customer-support employees won’t 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 app’s legality.
In an August memo that Clearview provided to potential customers, including the
Atlanta Police Department and the Pinellas County Sheriff’s 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 don’t
have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it
isn’t 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
Sheriff’s Office soon started using Clearview.
Because the police upload photos of people they’re 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 Clearview’s systems and for a while
showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a
“software bug.”
“It’s creepy what they’re 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, we’re 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 can’t link to your profile,
your Facebook photos won’t 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.
“We’ve 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 don’t 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.”
Where Everybody Knows Your NameDuring a recent interview at Clearview’s offices
in a WeWork location in Manhattan’s 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 Clearview’s investors predict that its app will eventually
be available to the public.
Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of
bad people who will misuse it,” he said.
Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company
might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as
easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive
conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets.
Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or
her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of
public anonymity.
Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr.
Ton-That seemed taken aback.
“I have to think about that,” he said. “Our belief is that this is the best use
of the technology.”
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Aaron Krolik contributed
reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter based in New York. She writes about the
unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives,
particularly when it comes to our privacy. @kashhill
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,”… nytimes.com
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