This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
You love Love Hey like it or not? Everybody facial recognition technology.
It is everywhere.
You may not realize it, but it is everywhere. It uses, you know, in terms of the applications vary from the mundane to well, you know, we use it right to open up our phone, yeah, open up other stuff. But it also the uses can be downright controversial.
I mean just think about Madison Square Garden. Yes, you've heard about this. It reportedly uses facial recognition technology to weed out lawyers at firms that are suing the company and bevets them from going to concerts and shows at the arena.
Welcome to the new reality.
Yeah, that's what it is. What can go wrong though, when law enforcement things or oppressed the governments get their hands on this technology. What happens when the technology gets so good that a company claims it can take a single photo of someone and then use that photo to find every detail of their life on the Internet.
It's the premise of a new national best selling book by New York Times technology reporter kashmiir Hill. The book is called your face belongs to us, A secretive startups quest to end privacy as we know it, and is no doubt about it. Tim, A very timely conversation.
Yeah.
The book has been longlisted for the Ft and Schroeder's Business Book of the Year awards. Kashmir right now joins us on Zoom from New York. Kashmir has been covering the intersection of privacy and tech for around fifteen years before people were even thinking about privacy online. So very pleased to have her with us this afternoon. Kashmir, good to talk to you. The book centers around Clearview AI. It's the secretive startup which you've been writing about and
following for years. It's got some pretty incredible technology. Tell us what they do?
Yeah, Hi Tim, Hi Carol, good to be here.
So what CLEARVIEWI did was it went out and scraped billions of photos from the Internet from social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Venmo. It did that without anyone's consent. Now has a database of thirty billion faces and has this facial recognition app where you can take a photo of someone and it will bring up all these other
places on the Internet where it's seen their face. Along with a link to where it appears, so you can find out someone's name, you know, where they live, who they know, maybe photos. They didn't even know we're on the internet. And they've been selling that app to police now for a few years.
Okay, So that's a really important point. It's not like you can go download this app from the app store and just start, you know, looking at photos of your colleagues and your friends on there. You've been able to see it in action though. Kashmir from the company tell us what it's like to kind of experience that.
Yeah, when I first started looking into Clearview AI, they were not happy about it, and they actually put an alert on my face so that they would know when police officers were I was talking to we're searching my face, and they blocked my face from having results, which was
which was a bit chilling. But eventually the come and he started talking to me, and its founder, Wanton Tat, has run searches on me several times over these years now that I've been talking to him for my reporting for The Times and for the book, and I just remember the first time he did this search of my face and you know, it brought up photos I knew about, you know, you know, headshots that I have put out there in the world. But it was also photos I had never seen before, photos of me.
With a source that I was interviewing for a story.
We were out at a public event, a photo where it was somebody standing in Washington, d C. With somebody walking by in the background. And when I first looked at the photo, I didn't think I was in it until I recognized the jacket the person in the background was wearing, and it was a very distinctive coat that I had bought in Tokyo. And so, you know, when this technology works, it can be incredible the photos that it's able to pull up.
Cash I would say that I think we all realize. I mean, I've got a security badge that I have to check into my office, right, I know that as I walk around the world out on streets, you know, you go over in Europe, like their cameras are everywhere. So I'm I have an awareness, and I think a lot of us do that. So much of what we do is being tracked digitally, right, we have these dossiers. Everything's being tracked. It's what people do with that information.
I feel like we're at this era of trying to understand where that information goes, how it's used to either you know, help or you know, more worrisome hurt us. So what is it about this company is worrisome about kind of maybe the use of that data.
Yeah, I mean, I think what's worrisome about it is this idea that we were all put in this database. I mean, I'm sure the three of us are in here, uh, and that we never got a choice in the matter. That it was operating secretly, you know, until I came along and discovered it. We didn't even know police had a technology like this. You know, the algorithm that they were using hadn't been tested. We'd actually didn't know how
accurate it was. And now that the technology is is out there, I think it just raises concerns about our ability to kind of move anonymously in a public space and trust that people aren't going to know who we are.
Clear UAI kind of broke this taboo.
I write in the book it wasn't a technological breakthrough, is actually an ethical one, and we are going to see copycats and this will be available to all of us, and it will mean that you can't have a private conversation over dinner, and trust that the people around you can't identify you, you can't buy something sensitive to pharmacy, and trust that somebody sees you can't take your picture
and know who you are. It just could really change our ability to just have you know, private going goings on in the world where anybody can take our picture.
Just think of the story the Bloomberg Business Week's story about location services with Google right, and police using those also.
It's just it's kind of the perfect segue to my next question for Kashmir, which is which is why Kashmir this is Clearview doing this and not Google or Facebook. You spent a big part of the book talking about that why it is Clearview even though technologically Google and Facebook could do this. I mean, think about all the pictures that Facebook has willingly from us, So Google, if we use Google Photos, has from us.
Yeah. I mean when I first found out about Clearviewyi, I just assumed that they were super geniuses, that they had been able to accomplish this thing, that Facebook and Google hadn't released, that governments hadn't built.
But I did find out in my reporting for.
The book that Google, Google and Facebook both developed this kind of technology internally. Eric Schmidt as early as twenty eleven s that it was the one technology that Google had developed and decided not to release. I watched this video of engineers at Facebook and twenty seventeen in this little conference room and then Low Park with a smartphone on the brim of a baseball cap held in place by rubber bands, and when the person wearing it looked around at people in the room, it actually.
Called out their names.
And this was really striking to me, because neither one of these companies released the product, and they just felt like it was too dangerous to put this out in the world, that it could be used in a bad way. And so yeah, it is very striking that Clearview was the company to do it. And I think it's in part because those companies Facebook, Google, they're just under more scrutiny.
They have more to lose, They've gotten in so much trouble over the years for privacy violations, whereas clear Views, this radical startup, you know, it has only only everything to gain by kind of putting this this radical technology out into the world.
I want to get into, like maybe the investigations in terms of security forces around the world that maybe have been looking into this company. Having said this, if you're not already freaked out, we have about a minute and a half and then we'll come back and talk some more. But tell us about some of the individuals that have somehow been connected with this company or behind this company.
Yeah.
So the main person I talked about before, Hwani ton Tat. He is the technical co founder. Grew up in Australia, loved technology nineteen years old, dropped out of college, moved to San Francisco, was just kind of trying to make it in the tech world, the tech gold rush in kind of the early two thousands, and he ended up moving to New York and really falling in with a more conservative crowd, people that were kind of on the
alt right. He ended up partnering with Richard Schwartz, decades older than him, had worked for Rudy Giuliani in New York City when he was the mayor. Another person helped them in the early days Charles Johnson, kind of well known on the internet as a conservative provocateur, a little bit of a troll of liberals, and they were working on this together. Peter Thiel was their first investor, with two hundred thousand dollars for the company that became CLEARVIEWAI.
It really kind of came out of those.
Those kind of online right currents around the time that Trump was becoming president.
All right, we're going to continue with the conversation. I've got to say, we're all just kind of hanging on each word because I think it's you know, this is the reality of our world. Right now, we have an understanding of it, but you begin to wonder, Okay, how does it get used exactly?
And when we come back, we're going to speak to Kashmir Hill, the author of this new book it's called Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secret of Startups, quest and Privacy as we know it. We're going to dive into the organizations that are using this technology, the law enforcement organizations, then also talk about how this technology is being used around the world by oppressive government.
Right. We all kind of google ourselves, let's be honest. But like normal, things pop up, but if you start to see all of a sudden, these pictures come up and you're like, where did that come from? That would freak me out. Heykash were one thing we're wondering, you know, and you get into this in the book is just
you know, global forces, global regulators around the world. I feel, especially when you go outside the United States, you go over in Europe, they're really concerned privacy issues when it comes to individuals. So what kind of scrutiny and what kind of oversight has Clearview kind of garnered from some of the regulators around the world.
Yeah, how private your faces really varies depending on where you live. And so after I kind of expose the existence of CLEARVIEWAI, privacy regulators in Europe, Canada, Australia all announced investigations into the company, and they all came to the same conclusion, which is that CLEARVIEWAI violated their privacy laws by collecting all this data about their citizens, this kind of sensitive biometric information without their consent, and they said, hey,
this is illegal. Some of the privacy regulators find them, and Clearview had been offering you know, its product to officers around the world, and this effectively kind of kicked a Clearview out of those countries.
But not here in the US.
No, here in the HUMANS has been very different.
We just do not have a federal law that really applies to what CLEARVIEWAI is doing. There are some states that have privacy laws that give you the right to access the information that a company holds on you. So if you're in a place like California or Connecticut, or Colorado or Virginia, you can actually go to Clearview dot AI and request to know what they have in their
database about you and ask that it be deleted. But the only state that has a very strong privacy law that's directly kind of about facial recognition technology is Illinois. And this law passed in two thousand and eight, the rare law that moved faster.
Than the technology.
And I tell the history in the book, but it says that if you want to use someone's biometric information, including their face print, you need to get their consent or pay up to five thousand dollars per use. And so there has been litigation against CLEARVIEWAI and Illinois. And you mentioned at the top of the program how Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition technology to ban lawyers anyone
who works for a firm that sued the company. And they do that in New York City at Madison Square Garden and Beacon Theater and Radio City Music Hall.
But Madison Square Garden also owns a theater.
In Chicago, and they can't use the technology that way there because they can't use lawyers, you know, faced prints in Illinois without their consent.
How much when police enforcement here in the United States have used this that it's led to mistakes or erroneous arrests, if you will.
So there are hundreds of police departments that have used clearview AI's technology. The Department of Homeland Security has a contract with them. The FBI does I know of one case where this has gone wrong, and there may be others that haven't come to light, but in that situation. A man named Randall Karan Reid was pulled over the day after Thanksgiving in Atlanta, Georgia, and the there are four police.
Cars that pulled him over.
They asked him to step out of his vehicle on the side of the highway and started to arrest him and told him there was a worn out in Jefferson Parish for him for larceny. And he said, where's Jefferson Parish And they said it's in Louisiana. He said, I've
never been to Louisiana in my life. And it turned out that he had been identified through running a surveillance still from a person who had been basically stealing purses in and around New Orleans and it had hit on Randall Reid, and when the police looked at his Facebook account, they said, wow, he has a lot of friends in New Orleans, and basically based on that, they issued this warrant for his arrest. He was held in jail for a week awaiting extradition until this was cleared up and
it became clear he wasn't the same person. He basically took a lot of photos of his face and a video of his face, and when the police looked at it, they noticed he had a distinctive mole on his face that the person they were seeking did not have.
Hey, Kashmir, Carol's died to get a question here. We have a couple of minute stare each other very very quickly talk a little bit about how oppressive governments have used this type of technology around the world.
Yeah, so, China and Russia are a bit further ahead of us in the deployment of facial recognition technology. And for example, Russia has rolled out kind of real time facial recognition on their surveillance cameras around Moscow and they've been used to identify.
Protesters against the war in Ukraine.
I've heard about doppelgangers who get stopped on the street because they look like somebody who's wanted. In China, it's also been used to identify, you know, protesters in Hong Kong, to to keep track of weaker Muslims there, and China's also used it for kind of these these wild use cases, like people who who wear pajamas in public in one city were identified with facial recognition and named and shamed on social media. If you jay walk there, you might just automatically get a ticket.
One thing that stuck at struck me in your book. The Chinese government has also started collecting DNA and tracking phones, layering multiple systems in an attempt to create and all seeing eye on its population of one point four billion. We know that this is what China is doing when you look at this and we've just got about a minute left. More broadly, I mean, I do my fingerprint multiple times a day to check in. I mean, we've given up so much. What is the big concern about
kind of where this goes beyond? Is it all about police, you know, arresting you falsely or what is it? And again just got about forty seconds.
I love that I only have forty seconds. I would just say, I there's many ways.
That's okay, that's many ways in which facial recognition technology can be beneficial and that we want to use it in our lives. But I think that we should have the ability to take what we want and not be forced to accept it just as being ubiquitous in our lives that were tracked all the time, that we just have no privacy. I think that's very dystopian and that we should be able to choose the future that we want and not just let what's possible with the technology determine it.
Right safe to say we're living in a surveillance state already, it's just how it's all used and where it goes from here. What a fascinating book and so glad we could have you with us.
Yeah, in YOURK Time Technology port Kashmir Hill. Her book is called Your Face Belongs to Us, A Secret of Startups, Quest to End Privacy as we know it. The book is out now. Also, we went to graduate school together and it's so cool to see all the success that Kashmir has had. Congrats on just a great book, Kashmir I really appreciate Kash taking the time to join us this afternoon.