The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
The
Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Until
recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an
app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own
photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime
model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability
to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law
enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the
Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a
groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload
it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those
photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three
billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube,
Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever
constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that
while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind
it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit
card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.
Until now, technology that readily identifies
everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion
of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have
refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it
was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.”
Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using
facial recognition technology.
But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law
enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according
to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying
its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair
it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify
every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an
attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where
they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also
licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
“The weaponization possibilities of this are
endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at
Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to
stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up
secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding
debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the
company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent
Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed
on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That,
using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not
return my emails or phone calls.
While the company was dodging me, it was also
monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo
through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company
representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that
Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law
enforcement is searching for.
Facial recognition technology has always been
controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to
deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial
recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been
vetted by independent experts.
Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law
enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company
whose ability to protect its data is untested.
The company eventually started answering my
questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage
start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for
use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release
it. And he said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app “flags possible
anomalous search behavior” in order to prevent users from conducting what it
deemed “inappropriate searches.”
In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by
Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of
New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind
Facebook and Palantir.
Another early investor is a small firm called
Kirenaga Partners. Its founder, David Scalzo, dismissed concerns about
Clearview making the internet searchable by face, saying it’s a valuable
crime-solving tool.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information
constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said.
“Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that
might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
Addicted to A.I.
Mr. Ton-That, 31, grew up a long way from Silicon
Valley. In his native Australia, he was raised on tales of his royal ancestors
in Vietnam. In 2007, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. The
iPhone had just arrived, and his goal was to get in early on what he expected
would be a vibrant market for social media apps. But his early ventures never
gained real traction.
In 2009, Mr. Ton-That created a site that let people
share links to videos with all the contacts in their instant messengers. Mr.
Ton-That shut it down after it was branded a “phishing scam.”
In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which
added Mr. Trump’s distinctive coif to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing
program. Both fizzled.
Dispirited, Mr. Ton-That moved to New York in 2016.
Tall and slender, with long black hair, he considered a modeling career, he
said, but after one shoot he returned to trying to figure out the next big
thing in tech. He started reading academic papers on artificial intelligence,
image recognition and machine learning.
Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book
event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now
61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and
serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early
2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business
together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his
contacts to drum up commercial interest.
Police departments have had access to facial
recognition tools for almost 20 years, but
they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images,
such as mug shots and driver’s license photos. In recent years, facial
recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon
offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of
images.
Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began
in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that
can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet,
such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks
including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives
of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said
it explicitly banned use
of its data for facial recognition.
Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial
recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a
system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net”
to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on
facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are. Clearview created a
vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into
“neighborhoods.” When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system,
it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored
in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which
those images came.
Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses,
but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on
credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had
some of those.”
Going Viral With Law Enforcement
By the end of 2017, the company had a formidable
facial recognition tool, which it called Smartcheckr. But Mr. Schwartz and Mr.
Ton-That weren’t sure whom they were going to sell it to.
Maybe it could be used to vet babysitters or as an
add-on feature for surveillance cameras. What about a tool for security guards
in the lobbies of buildings or to help hotels greet guests by name? “We thought
of every idea,” Mr. Ton-That said.
One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul
Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white”
Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional
databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided
to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never
actually offered such services.
The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and
began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first
round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among
other things, Mr. Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit
that bankrupted the popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had
been the subject of negative articles by Gawker.
“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder
$200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said
Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he
is not involved in the company.”
Even after a second funding round in 2019, Clearview
remains tiny, having raised $7 million from investors, according to Pitchbook, a website that
tracks investments in start-ups. The company declined to confirm the amount.
In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting
with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men
had gotten into a fight in a park, and it ended when one shot the other in the
stomach. A bystander recorded the crime on a phone, so the police had a still
of the gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s app.
They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a
video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a
caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been
arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,” said Chuck Cohen,
an Indiana State Police captain at the time.
The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he
probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social
media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying
customer, according to the company. (The police declined to comment beyond
saying that they tested Clearview’s app.)
Clearview deployed current and former Republican
officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses
for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help
make government officials aware of the tool, according to Mr. Ton-That. (Mr.
Schwartz declined to comment beyond saying that he’d had to “significantly
scale back” his involvement with Clearview because of his wife’s health.)
The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica
Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama
attorney general. Brandon Fricke, an N.F.L. agent engaged to the Fox Nation
host Tomi Lahren, said in a financial
disclosure report during a congressional campaign in
California that he was a “growth consultant” for the company.
(Clearview said that it was a brief, unpaid role, and that the company had
enlisted Democrats to help market its product as well.)
The company’s most effective sales technique was
offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition
departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police
departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents
provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr.
Ton-That finally had his viral hit.
In July, a detective in Clifton, N.J., urged his
captain in an email to buy the software because it was “able to identify a
suspect in a matter of seconds.” During the department’s free trial, Clearview
had identified shoplifters, an Apple Store thief and a good Samaritan who had
punched out a man threatening people with a knife.
Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens
and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the
detective wrote in the email,
provided to The Times by two researchers, Beryl Lipton of MuckRock and Freddy
Martinez of Open the Government. They discovered Clearview late last year while
looking into how local police departments
are using facial recognition.
According to a Clearview sales presentation reviewed
by The Times, the app helped identify a range of individuals: a person who was
accused of sexually abusing a child whose face appeared in the mirror of
someone’s else gym photo; the person behind a string of mailbox thefts in
Atlanta; a John Doe found dead on an Alabama sidewalk; and suspects in multiple
identity-fraud cases at banks.
In Gainesville, Fla., Detective Sgt. Nick Ferrara
heard about Clearview last summer when it advertised on CrimeDex, a list-serv
for investigators who specialize in financial crimes. He said he had previously
relied solely on a state-provided facial recognition tool, FACES, which
draws from more than 30 million Florida mug shots and Department of Motor
Vehicle photos.
Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he
said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES,
Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the
camera.
“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t
perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or
it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”
He uploaded his own photo to the system, and it
brought up his Venmo page. He ran photos from old, dead-end cases and
identified more than 30 suspects. In September, the Gainesville Police
Department paid $10,000 for an annual Clearview license.
Federal law enforcement, including the F.B.I. and the
Department of Homeland Security, are trying it, as are Canadian law enforcement
authorities, according to the company and government officials.
Despite its growing popularity, Clearview avoided
public mention until the end of 2019,
when Florida prosecutors charged a woman with grand theft after two grills and
a vacuum were stolen from an Ace Hardware store in Clermont. She was identified
when the police ran a still from a surveillance video through Clearview, which
led them to her Facebook page. A tattoo visible in the surveillance video and
Facebook photos confirmed her identity, according to an affidavit in the case.
‘We’re All Screwed’
Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most
of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the
material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on
ceilings or high on walls.
“They put surveillance cameras too high,” Mr.
Ton-That lamented. “The angle is wrong for good face recognition.”
Despite that, the company said, its tool finds
matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool
delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party
such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency
that rates the performance of
facial recognition algorithms.
“We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,”
said Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy
and Technology, who has studied the government’s use of facial recognition. “The larger the
database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger
effect. They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found
on the internet.”
But current and former law enforcement officials say
the app is effective. “For us, the testing was whether it worked or not,” said
Mr. Cohen, the former Indiana State Police captain.
One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its
service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites
prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’
terms of service.
“A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That
shrugged. “Facebook knows.”
Jay Nancarrow, a Facebook spokesman, said the company
was reviewing the situation with Clearview and “will take appropriate action if
we find they are violating our rules.”
Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s
board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s personal investments.
Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t
realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s
servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to
would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the
photos that the police upload.
Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States
solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the
app’s legality.
In an August memo that Clearview provided to
potential customers, including the Atlanta Police Department and
the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, Mr. Clement said law
enforcement agencies “do not violate the federal Constitution or relevant
existing state biometric and privacy laws when using Clearview for its intended
purpose.”
Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis,
wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were
identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a
warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for
comment.
The memo appeared to be effective; the Atlanta police
and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office soon started using Clearview.
Because the police upload photos of people they’re
trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who
have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability
to manipulate the results that the police see. After the company realized I was
asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by
Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this,
Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”
“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be
many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a
privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy
law, we’re all screwed.”
Mr. Ton-That said his company used only publicly
available images. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook so that search
engines can’t link to your profile, your Facebook photos won’t be included in
the database, he said.
But if your profile has already been scraped, it is
too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are
later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working
on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been
taken down from the website of origin.
Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer
science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest
proof that facial recognition should
be banned in the United States.
“We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and
not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because
there is so much money on the table,” Mr. Hartzog said. “I don’t see a future
where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the
crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it
is to ban it.”
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
During a recent interview at Clearview’s offices in a
WeWork location in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Mr. Ton-That demonstrated
the app on himself. He took a selfie and uploaded it. The app pulled up 23
photos of him. In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered
in what looks like blood.
Mr. Ton-That then took my photo with the app. The
“software bug” had been fixed, and now my photo returned numerous results,
dating back a decade, including photos of myself that I had never seen before.
When I used my hand to cover my nose and the bottom of my face, the app still
returned seven correct matches for me.
Police officers and Clearview’s investors predict
that its app will eventually be available to the public.
Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always
going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.
Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly
available, a copycat company might, know that the taboo is broken. Searching
someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be
able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants
and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately
identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It
would herald the end of public anonymity.
Asked about the implications of bringing such a power
into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.
“I have to think about that,” he said. “Our belief is
that this is the best use of the technology.”
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Gabriel J.X. Dance and
Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete