Your Face Belongs to Us
A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
-
-
4.5 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it
“The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired
Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?
In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.
Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times reporter Hill's disquieting debut investigates the dangers posed by tech startup Clearview AI, whose search engine can scan a photo of a person's face and sift through billions of online images to find other photos of that person, often with identifying information, such as social media accounts. The author portrays Clearview as insidious yet goofy, sometimes simultaneously (coder-in-chief Hoan Ton-That once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song in support of alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos), and follows the company as it woos venture capital and fends off government regulators. Highlighting how powerful Clearview's technology has become since it began in 2017, even when working with images of individuals captured in dim light or at odd angles, Hill relates the case of an unidentified child abuser who was tracked down by detectives after Clearview's software found his visage in the background of a crowd photo on Instagram, where "his face would have been half as big as your fingernail." While Clearview publicly declared they "would work only with police," reports that they've continued courting corporate clients raises dystopian concerns, Hill argues, describing how Madison Square Garden used a different company's facial recognition technology to bar from the arena lawyers involved in lawsuits against the venue's owners. Combining vivid reportage with a chilling overview of facial recognition technology's capabilities, this unnerves.
