James' World 2

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Kashmir is a terrific reporter. At The Verge, we have been jealous of her work across Forbes, Gizmodo, and now, the Times for years. She’s long been focused on covering privacy on the internet, which she is first to describe as the dystopia beat because the amount of tracking that occurs all over our networks every day is almost impossible to fully understand or reckon with. But people get it when the systems start tracking faces — when that last bit of anonymity goes away. And, remarkably, Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook have had the ability to track faces like this for years, but they haven’t really done anything with it. It seems like that’s a line that’s too hard for a lot of people to cross.

But not everyone. Your Face Belongs to Us is the story of Clearview AI, a secretive startup that, until January 2020, was virtually unknown to the public, despite selling this state-of-the-art facial recognition system to cops and corporations. The company’s co-founders Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz are some of the most interesting and complex characters in tech, with some direct connections to right-wing money and politics.

Clearview scraped the public internet from billions of photos, using everything from Venmo transactions to Flickr posts. With that data, it built a comprehensive database of faces and made it searchable. Clearview sees itself as the Google of facial recognition, reorganizing the internet by face searches, and its primary customers have become police departments and now the Department of Homeland Security. 

Kashmir was the journalist who broke the first story about Clearview’s existence, starting with a bombshell investigation report that blew the doors open on the company’s clandestine operations. Over the past few years, she’s been relentlessly reporting on Clearview’s growth, the privacy implications of facial recognition technology, and all of the cautionary tales that inevitably popped up, from wrongful arrests to billionaires using the technology for personal vendettas. The book is fantastic. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’re going to love it, and I highly recommend it.

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Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge

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