Kashmir Hill, YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US: A Secretive Startup's Quest To end Privacy As We Know It
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Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story from NY Times Technology Reporter Kasmir Hill, about the rise of a technological superpower that has been long-feared by the civil liberties community and long-desired by governments and authoritarian regimes. And it is a powerful warning that in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, this kind of technology will fundamentally change our ability to be anonymous.
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. 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 billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel and conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson—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.
Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter at The New York Times, where her writing about privacy and tech pioneered the genre. Hill has worked and written for a number of publications including, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Gizmodo, Popular Science, Forbes, and many others.
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