Your Face Belongs to Us

In this riveting account, Kashmir Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, a tiny facial recognition startup that created the ultimate surveillance tool. With their online database of billions of faces, Clearview AI can, using just one snapshot of someone’s face, surface every detail of their online life. Though Google, supplemented by Facebook, decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, Clearview AI—led by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor—forged ahead. Backed by a controversial cast of characters, including Peter Thiel, Ton-That and Schwartz shared the app with private investors, pitched it to businesses, and offered it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world. Facial recognition technology, which opens a dangerous portal between our lives online and in person, has been quietly growing more powerful for decades and 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, facial recognition threatens what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”