![]() Overseas, the leaked documents suggested that Clearview had expanded to at least 26 countries outside the US, including the UK, where searches (perhaps unauthorised) by people in the Met, the National Crime Agency and police forces in Northamptonshire, North Yorkshire, Suffolk, Surrey and Hampshire were logged by Clearview servers. In the US, the bulk of institutional purchases came from local and state police departments. Internal company documents leaked to BuzzFeed in 2020 suggested that up to that time people associated with 2,228 law enforcement agencies, companies and institutions had created accounts and collectively performed nearly 500,000 searches – all of them tracked and logged by the company. It’s not clear how many customers the company has. ![]() And guess what? Thiel was an early investor in Clearview. He first persuaded mid-ranking military officers to try it out, knowing that they would eventually make the pitch to their superiors from the inside. It’s the way that Peter Thiel got the Pentagon to buy the data-analysis software of his company Palantir. But if you can get an insider, even a relatively junior one, to try your stuff and find it useful, then you’re halfway to a sale. Selling to corporations qua corporations from the outside is hard. But the killer punch was that there was always somewhere a trial subscription option that an individual officer could use to see if the thing worked. Underneath would be a list of annual subscription options – anything from $10,000 for five users to $250,000 for 500. Start Solving” in what looks like 95-point Helvetica Bold. Bingo! Schwartz realised that US law enforcement agencies would go for it like ravening wolvesĬlearview’s marketing pitch played to the law enforcement gallery: a two-page spread, with the left-hand page dominated by the slogan “Stop Searching. The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media and his name was included in a caption on the video clip. A bystander recorded the crime on a smartphone, so the police had a still of the gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s app. Two men had got into a fight in a park, which ended with one shooting the other in the stomach. In February 2019 it solved a case in 20 minutes. According to Hill’s report, the Indiana police department was the company’s first customer. ![]() It didn’t take Schwartz long to realise that US law enforcement agencies would go for it like ravening wolves. The idea was that Ton-That would supervise the creation of a powerful facial-recognition app while Schwartz would use his bulging Rolodex to drum up business interest. It was founded by a tech entrepreneur named Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, who had been an aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York and still, er, respectable. Most of us had never heard of Clearview until January 2021 when Kashmir Hill, a fine tech journalist, revealed its existence in the New York Times. The fly in this soothing ointment is that the people whose images make up the database were not informed that their photographs were being collected or used in this way and they certainly never consented to their use in this way. Clearview describes its business as “building a secure world, one face at a time”. The app produces a list of images that have similar characteristics to those in the photo provided by the customer, together with a link to the websites whence those images came. The company uses this database to provide a service that allows customers to upload an image of a person to its app, which is then checked for a match against all the images in the database. It’s a US outfit that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems. Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”.
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