Your Face Belongs to Us

April 1, 2023

In Your Face Belongs to Us, New York Times technology reporter Hill shows how Clearview AI's advanced facial recognition technology, which can assemble a welter of personal details from a single fuzzy image, is a clear threat to privacy. Prepub Alert.

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July 31, 2023
New York Times reporter Hill’s disquieting debut investigates the dangers posed by tech startup Clearview AI, whose search engine can scan a photo of a person’s face and sift through billions of online images to find other photos of that person, often with identifying information, such as social media accounts. The author portrays Clearview as insidious yet goofy, sometimes simultaneously (coder-in-chief Hoan Ton-That once wrote a tongue-in-cheek song in support of alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos), and follows the company as it woos venture capital and fends off government regulators. Highlighting how powerful Clearview’s technology has become since it began in 2017, even when working with images of individuals captured in dim light or at odd angles, Hill relates the case of an unidentified child abuser who was tracked down by detectives after Clearview’s software found his visage in the background of a crowd photo on Instagram, where “his face would have been half as big as your fingernail.” While Clearview publicly declared they “would work only with police,” reports that they’ve continued courting corporate clients raises dystopian concerns, Hill argues, describing how Madison Square Garden used a different company’s facial recognition technology to bar from the arena lawyers involved in lawsuits against the venue’s owners. Combining vivid reportage with a chilling overview of facial recognition technology’s capabilities, this unnerves.

August 15, 2023
A New York Times tech reporter delivers an expos� of the frightening possibilities of a new facial-recognition technology company. In January 2020, Hill published an article in the Times bringing Clearview AI to public scrutiny as an exceedingly secretive startup company that could identify everything about a person's life based on a photograph. Regarded previously as a "dystopian technology that most people associated only with science fiction novels or movies such as Minority Report," facial recognition has proven exciting to many law enforcement agencies and terrifying to privacy-conscious citizens. Working on a tip in late 2019 about claims by Clearview's high-profile lawyer, Paul Clement, formerly solicitor general under George W. Bush, Hill learned that more than 200 law enforcement agencies "were already using the tool," and "the company had hired a fancy lawyer to reassure officers that they weren't committing a crime by doing so." The author partially chronicles the history about the company, started by a "ragtag crew with rightward leanings"--namely, Vietnamese Australian technophile Hoan Ton-That and conservative troll Chuck Johnson. Drawing on outdated theories of physiognomy and "genetic determinism," as well as similar surveillance technology then developing in China and Russia, Clearview originally called the technology smartcheckr.com, "a tool that could theoretically identify and root out extreme liberals." Indiana State Police became its first official customers in 2019, with many others to follow, including the Department of Homeland Security. Hill underscores the danger of misidentification and the huge ethical ramifications for a company "willing to cross a line that other technology companies feared, for good reason." Due to the pandemic, she was unable to pursue this technology in Russia and China, which makes the book feel incomplete. Still, the author provides a solid foundation for further investigative digging. Though not fully fleshed, a haunting portrait of sci-fi darkness in the real world.

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Starred review from August 18, 2023

New York Times reporter Hill got a tip in November 2019 about Clearview AI, which claimed its revolutionary facial recognition app could identify people and their information--name, home address, names of family members, and more--simply by scanning a snapshot of their face. This book exposes the reality and reach of the app, which has a database growing at a rate of 75 million images per day. Initially restricted to an exclusive client base of eager law enforcement agencies, Clearview has the power to track people too, reporting who was where, when, with whom, and doing what. The book notes that the app raises prospects about not only governmental, Big Brother-type, omnipresent surveillance but also predatory or prurient peeping and stalking. Readers will learn how the app threatens that elusive but prized personal sense of being free from intrusion, and it promotes a culture of justified suspicion about when or where anyone can have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The author calls for accountability from people who control a runaway technology that can wield great power over society. VERDICT This prime example of exemplary investigative reporting spotlights the hazards of unregulated big data mining.--Thomas J. Davis

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September 1, 2023
Facial recognition software lends itself to abuse even among individuals and institutions with good intentions. A tech startup influenced by provocateurs and right-wing billionaires may have baked in violations from the beginning. New York Times tech reporter Hill was relieved to find that the secretive Clearview AI, which claimed to be able to find out everything about a person's life from one photograph, had wriggled clear of most of that bad influence by the time its search engine accessing the billions of pictures uploaded on the internet everyday was ready for use by police forces. This is a deep dive into the history of facial recognition software, electronic surveillance in free societies as well as authoritarian regimes, and strategies to protect privacy. This struggle is no longer an sf theme; Hill stresses the need for regulations and countervailing forces to limit the exploitation, intimidation, and loss of rights that is already occurring due to the misuse of this invasive technology. Hill's thorough and revealing investigation should be read by everyone who values privacy and holding the powerful accountable for infringing on our rights.

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