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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 Internet.[1] Founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, the company maintained a low profile until late 2019, when its usage by law enforcement was reported on.[2][1][3]

Clearview's investors include Peter Thiel[1] and Naval Ravikant.[2] Clearview's technology has been used by numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.[1][4][5] 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, and has misrepresented its usage at other agencies.[4][2]

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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8]

Founders

Hoan Ton-That (born c. 1989)[1] worked as a software developer at AngelList[when?] 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 described as phishing or a computer worm.[9][10][11][12][13] Ton-That denied creating a phishing site and claimed a software bug was the cause.[14] He then created fastforwarded.com, a similar phishing site.[14] He also created an app called "Trump Hair", which placed Donald Trump's hair on photos.[1]

Richard Schwartz (born c. 1959) is a graduate of Columbia University and New York University, holding degrees in History and Public Policy. He began his career working for Henry Stern, when Stern was a member of the New York City Council. Schwartz continued working with Stern during Stern's tenure as New York City Parks Commissioner under New York City Mayor Ed Koch.[15] Schwartz heavily contributed to the 1980s New York City Parks restoration and continued public service under Mayor David Dinkins. He was appointed senior policy advisor to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s. Schwartz authored the Work Experience Program, a welfare reform program.[15] Schwartz founded Opportunity America, a job matching service for welfare recipients, one day after leaving public service in 1997. He served as Editorial 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.[16][1][17]

History

In late 2017, Clearview (then Smartcheckr) hired a contractor, later doxed as 'Ricky Vaughn', a pseudonym for Douglass Mackey, who is associated with alt-right white supremacist congressional candidate Paul Nehlen. Unbeknownst to Clearview, Vaughn sent a proposal for work to Nehlen titled "Smartcheckr Consulting Group."[18] Clearview claims to have had no knowledge of the contractor's Ricky Vaughn persona, and the technology in the proposal does not exist.[2]

Clearview's marketing claimed their facial recognition led to a terrorist arrest. The identification was submitted to the New York Police Department tip line, but the NYPD did not use this tip to identify the suspect.[19] Clearview claims to have solved two other New York cases and "40 cold cases", later stating they submitted them to tip lines.[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.[20] Clearview AI hired Paul Clement, a former Solicitor General and former acting United States Attorney General to help assuage privacy concerns, where he wrote law enforcement agencies “do not violate the federal Constitution or relevant existing state biometric and privacy laws when using Clearview for its intended purpose.”[1] Former New York City Police Commissioner and Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bill Bratton challenged privacy concerns and recommended strong procedures for law enforcement usage in response to media coverage of Clearview AI.[21]

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. ^ a b "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.
  5. ^ 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)
  6. ^ "Clearview AI". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  7. ^ "Clearview Is Not A Consumer Application". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  8. ^ "Clearview AI, Inc. Privacy Policy". Clearview. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  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. ^ a b Thomas, Owen. "'Anarcho-Transexual' Hacker Returns with New Scam Site". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020. Fastforwarded.com
  15. ^ a b "Who Cleans the Park?". Google Books. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  16. ^ "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.
  17. ^ "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.
  18. ^ Christopher Cantwell https://christophercantwell.com/2018/04/08/doxing-and-anonymity/. Retrieved 2020-01-25. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  19. ^ "How NYPD's facial recognition software ID'ed subway rice cooker kook". New York Post. Retrieved 2020-01-25.
  20. ^ "Twitter demands AI company stops 'collecting faces'". BBC News. 23 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  21. ^ "Face recognition is not the enemy". New York Daily News. 26 January 2020. Retrieved 26 January 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)


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