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Clearview AI

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Clearview AI
Company typePrivate
IndustryFacial recognition
Founded2017
FoundersHoan Ton-That
Richard Schwartz
Headquarters
Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Areas served
United States, Canada
Websitewww.clearview.ai

Clearview AI is an American technology company that provides facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies. The company has developed technology that can match faces to a database of more than three billion images indexed from the public web, including Internet social media websites, news sites, and other sources.[1] Founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, the company maintained a low profile until late 2019, as is standard for small startups.[2][1][3]

Clearview's 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] Clearview's technology is predominantly used to identify murder, sexual assault, domestic violence, and child sexual exploitation cases.[1][8] Clearview's technology has resulted in successful identifications, positive user testimonials, and further recommendations to law-enforcement agencies.[5]

Technology

Clearview is a reverse image search tool used on a database of publicly available internet images, much like Google Images' "Search by Image" feature.[9] Clearview is explicitly not a consumer product, and is designed exclusively to assist law enforcement and security professionals in identifying suspects via publicly available internet content.[8] Search results include only links to publicly available websites, and do not include private personal information such as home addresses, employment history, and phone numbers.[10]

Founder backgrounds

Hoan Ton-That (born c. 1989)[1] worked as a software developer at AngelList prior to founding Clearview AI. Ton-That first gained public notice in 2009, when he created ViddyHo, a website that spammed users' contacts and was widely described as a phishing application.[11][12][13][14][15] Ton-That denied creating a phishing site and cited a software bug as the cause of the application's virality.[16]

Richard Schwartz (born c. 1959) was a senior policy advisor to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. Under the Family Support Act championed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Schwartz authored the Work Experience Program, a New York City welfare reform program described as a precursor to the 1997 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program later provided federally through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He founded Opportunity America, a job matching service for welfare recipients, one day after leaving public service in 1997. He served as an editor at the New York Daily News in the 2000s, where he was shortlisted for three Pulitzer Prizes. Ton-That and Schwartz met at the Manhattan Institute.[17] [1][18]

History

In late 2017, Clearview (then Smartchecker) hired an independent researcher recommended by a liberal Democrat contact.[1][2] The researcher completed three weeks of work for Clearview and had no further association with the company.[2] In April 2018, the researcher was doxed as Ricky Vaughn, a prominent alt-right commentator. Ton-That and Schwartz had no knowledge of the researcher's Ricky Vaughn persona.[2] Unbeknownst to Clearview, Vaughn sent an unsolicited proposal to white supremacist congressional candidate Paul Nehlen titled "Smartchecker Consulting Group."[19] Clearview did not seek this work, and the technology described in the proposal does not exist.[2] During Vaughn's doxing, Nazi Christopher Cantwell used the proposal as evidence that Vaughn was conspiring with Jews.[19] This invited a torrent of ethnic and racial abuse against Schwartz and Ton-That, including threats of violence and exposure of personal information on alt-right web forums. Schwartz and Ton-That changed the company name to Clearview and removed traceable information from the internet in order to protect their personal safety and distance themselves from Vaughn's unsolicited proposal.[2]

In August 2019, Clearview tested its technology on a publicly available photograph of a terrorism suspect, returning a positive identification. This identification was submitted to the New York Police Department tip line, but the NYPD did not use this tip to identify the suspect.[20] Clearview used the success of this test in subsequent marketing, but never claimed that their technology led to the suspect's arrest.[2] Clearview claims to have solved 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]

Criticism

Some U.S. Senators expressed concerns about the possibility of abuse of the technology and invasions of privacy.[when?][citation needed] Twitter protested against the use of its data by Clearview.[21] Clearview AI hired Paul Clement, a former Solicitor General and former acting United States Attorney General to help assuage privacy concerns.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i 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 f g h i "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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b "Clearview Is Not A Consumer Application". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  9. ^ "Clearview AI". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  10. ^ "Clearview AI, Inc. Privacy Policy". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  11. ^ "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.)
  12. ^ "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.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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.)
  15. ^ "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.
  16. ^ Thomas, Owen. "'Anarcho-Transexual' Hacker Returns with New Scam Site". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Fastforwarded.com
  17. ^ "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.
  18. ^ "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.
  19. ^ a b Christopher Cantwell https://christophercantwell.com/2018/04/08/doxing-and-anonymity/. Retrieved 2020-01-25. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  20. ^ "How NYPD's facial recognition software ID'ed subway rice cooker kook". New York Post. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  21. ^ "Twitter demands AI company stops 'collecting faces'". BBC News. 23 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)


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