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Clearview AI

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Clearview AI
Company typePrivate
IndustryFacial recognition
Founded2018
FoundersHoan Ton-That
Richard Schwartz
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
,
United States
Areas served
United States, Canada
Websitewww.clearview.ai Edit this on Wikidata

Clearview AI is a facial recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz that has developed technology to match faces to a database of more than three billion images indexed from the open web, including Internet social media websites, news sites, and other sources.[1]

Ton-That created a facial recognition tool called Smartcheckr by 2017. They later incorporated as Clearview AI in 2019 but operated in relative secrecy until late 2019.[2][1][3] Its investors include Peter Thiel[1] and Naval Ravikant.[4] Clearview's technology has been used by numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.[1][5][6]

Public records show Clearview AI has contracted with the New York State Police, as well as several local police departments, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Broward County Sheriff's Office.[7][2] They have claimed to work with the FBI and 600 other departments, but this appears to include reporting to police tip lines, not contracted departments. Clearview's marketing claimed their facial recognition led to a terrorist arrest by the New York Police Department, but this was debunked by Buzzfeed, who found that the NYPD and others never used Clearview for this case. Clearview also claimed to solve two other New York cases and "40 cold cases", later stating they submitted them to tip lines, though Buzzfeed could not confirm any of these.[2]

US senators expressed their concerns about the possibility of abuse of the face recognition technology and the destruction of citizens' anonymity, and promised to find ways to prevent this from happening. Also, Twitter protested against the use of its data by Clearview.[8] Clearview AI hired Paul Clement, a former Solicitor General and former acting United States Attorney General to help assuage privacy concerns.[1]

Ton-That, born ca 1989,[1] previously created HappyAppy and ViddyHo, a phishing application or computer worm that spammed a users' contacts. Ton-That was sought by the police when this worm spread in 2009.[9][10] [11][12][13] He then created fastforwarded.com, a similar phishing site.[14] Ton-That later worked at AngelList.[2] He also created an app called "Trump Hair", which placed Donald Trump's hair on photos.[1] Ton-That and Clearview AI have been linked with far right/alt-right supporters such as Chuck Johnson, Mike Cernovich, Douglass Mackey, and Paul Nehlen.[2]

Richard Schwartz, born ca 1959, was an assistant to Rudy Giuliani and acquired and "impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s" and authored the signature Work Experience Program, a welfare-to-work program. He founded Opportunity America, a job matching service for welfare recipients, one day after leaving public service in 1997. Later, he was the editor of New York Daily News. Ton-That and Schwartz met at the Manhattan Institute.[15] [1][16]


References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Hill, Kashmir (2020-01-18). "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That's Not True". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 23 January 2020. As it signed deals, Clearview continued to misrepresent its relationship with the NYPD. It used images of the suspect from the Brooklyn bar beating in an October email sent through CrimeDex, a crime alert listserv used by police across the nation. In that email, which BuzzFeed News obtained via a public records request to the Bradenton, Florida, police department, a random man whose image was taken from an Argentine LinkedIn page is identified as a "possible match." His name, however, does not match the name of the person who turned himself in to the NYPD.
  3. ^ "Law enforcement is using a facial recognition app with huge privacy issues". Engadget. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
  4. ^ "Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That's Not True". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 25 January 2020. While Clearview operated quietly with a bare-bones website and no social media presence, it tried to raise more than $10 million from venture investors. One potential person who met with the company said they were introduced by Naval Ravikant, a Clearview backer who previously employed Ton-That at AngelList, the angel investing network that Ravikant cofounded.
  5. ^ Lipton, Beryl (January 18, 2020). "Records on Clearview AI reveal new info on police use". MuckRock. Retrieved 2020-01-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ^ Brieskorn, Megan Cruz, Katlyn (December 27, 2019). "Florida law enforcement agencies use facial recognition to identify alleged thief". WFTV. Retrieved 2020-01-18.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. ^ "Records on Clearview AI reveal new info on police use". MuckRock. Retrieved 23 January 2020. In collaboration with Open The Government, MuckRock requested materials from the largest police departments in the country, including Atlanta, Georgia, which first released records on Clearview AI.
  8. ^ "Twitter demands AI company stops 'collecting faces'". BBC News. 23 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ "The person behind a privacy nightmare has a familiar face". SFChronicle.com. Retrieved 23 January 2020. I wrote about Ton-That in February 2009 ("scathingly," Hill writes), when he was living in San Francisco, developing first Facebook and then iPhone apps. He made the news for creating ViddyHo, a website that tricked users into sharing access to their Gmail accounts — a hacking technique known as "phishing" — and then spammed their contacts on the Google Talk chat app. (The episode does not appear on Ton-That's sanitized personal website.)
  10. ^ "Phishing Attacks Increase After Gmail Outage". Redorbit. Retrieved 23 January 2020. San Francisco police are searching for a man who reportedly registered the ViddyHo domain under the name Cam-Hoan Ton-That.
  11. ^ Snyder, Gabriel. "ViddyHo Worm Sweeping Through IM". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Here's a bit of a public service announcement: If someone asks you over IM to "Hey check out this video!" they foolishly fell for the just-breaking ViddyHo virus. Don't follow them.
  12. ^ Thomas, Owen. "Was an 'Anarcho-Transexual Afro-Chicano' Behind the IM Worm?". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Ton-That frequently posted on Twitter about going to Sugarlump, an overwroughtly hip San Francisco "coffee lounge" in a rough-hewn but gentrifying corner of the Mission District, the preferred neighborhood of twentysomething Web developers. HappyAppy's office address is listed as 25 Stillman Street, a classically South of Market location for a startup. (In fact, it was once the home of Socializr, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams's current company.)
  13. ^ "Internet Worm Linked to San Francisco Man | News | The Harvard Crimson". thecrimson.com. Retrieved 23 January 2020. The site Venture Hacks lists Hoan Ton-That as the sole member of HappyAppy Inc, a relationship that was confirmed by Hoan's lawyer, Andre Gharakhanian of Silicon Legal Strategy.
  14. ^ Thomas, Owen. "'Anarcho-Transexual' Hacker Returns with New Scam Site". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Fastforwarded.com
  15. ^ "A Maximus Postscript | The Village Voice". villagevoice.com. Retrieved 23 January 2020. In addition to obtaining special access to Turner, Hevesi charged, Maximus had an added edge because of its alliance with Schwartz, Giuliani's former senior adviser and the man who had shaped the administration's welfare policies. After leaving City Hall in 1997, Schwartz had started a new for-profit firm, Opportunity America, to help place welfare recipients in jobs. Schwartz won work with government and private businesses and later also enlisted to work with Maximus on its HRA contracts. His share of the contracts was expected to be worth about $30 million, records showed.
  16. ^ "The Welfare Estate". City Limits. 1 June 1999. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Then, on February 11, 1997, at age 38, Richard Schwartz announced he was leaving city government. The next day, he founded Opportunity America. His specialty would be corporate matchmaker, the missing link to help private-sector companies hire welfare recipients. But he promised in The New York Times that he wouldn't take advantage of his government experience to win consulting contracts with New York City.


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