Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy

"This reads like a mystery, although we already know the outcome. This is a work of truly rigorous investigative journalism by the reporter who broke the story about this company, Clearview AI, in The New York Times : how it is using facial recognition in startling new ways, and how it has sold its software to police organisations who are using it to try to identify criminals from videos. That has a lot of dangers in terms of privacy, and also in the bias that these kinds of algorithms can have. There’s a stronger likelihood of wrongly identifying a black person as a perpetrator, for example, due to the data set it is trained on. The book reads like a thriller. Hill walks you through the whole process of investigating this case, mostly chronologically. The creator of Clearview AI started from humble beginnings, taking academic research papers and cobbling them together to create new code that could analyse more and more data, in more and more sophisticated ways. Along the way, they were gathering together as many public images of faces they could from the internet, making a database that grew and grew and grew. As the code grew, they got more people involved to make it work better and better. Eventually, it had a kind of breakthrough, started to be recognised and used by more and more businesses, and ultimately by law enforcement. Now it’s a multi-million-dollar company. Other people were working on facial recognition technology with AI, but big companies—like Google and Facebook—decided they would draw a line and not go further with this technology. I think that says something; if mega-corporations are not willing to go so far, for what they say are ethical reasons, yet this company went there, and has a huge database, who do these facial data belong to? As they really are out there in the public domain, are those data free game for any purpose (or should there be more nuance)? Hill makes the fascinating point, that maybe we own our own biometric data, and we should be fighting more for this ownership—because it’s valuable data that is very important to our privacy. I thought that was a great direction to take the story, and I was absolutely gripped by the book from beginning to end. It kept blowing my mind, all along the way. I kept shaking my head, like: Wow, I can’t believe this happened, and nobody stopped it. I think people should read it, and I think they will enjoy reading it. It’s an exciting tale, and an important one."