Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy.

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.įederal 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. 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. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. 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. 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.