![]() ![]() It also links to the sites from which those images came, which frequently gives a user the person’s name. The result is an individual’s “faceprint.”Ĭlearview created a directory that grouped photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.” When a user uploads a photo of someone’s face into Clearview’s system, it shows all the scraped photos in the same “neighborhood” - in other words, the ones the app thinks are likely of the same person. The result: a system that uses what Ton-That described to The Times as a “state-of-the-art neural net” that converts all images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial measurements - like how far apart a person’s eyes are. Hoan Ton-That, founder of Clearview AI, whose app matches faces to images it collects from across the internet. Ton-That would develop the technology Schwartz would tap his Rolodex of conservative powerbrokers to drum up business. The two agreed to start a facial recognition company. ![]() The genesis of Clearview was a 2016 meeting at a conservative think tank between Hoan Ton-That, a tech entrepreneur in his early 30s, and Richard Schwartz, who was an aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York, according to The Times expose. The six municipal police departments in Hampton Roads and the Virginia State Police told The Pilot they haven’t used Clearview and have no plans to do so. Clearview declined to provide a list of those agencies to The Times for its story earlier this year, and Jessica Medeiros Garrison, a Clearview sales representative, didn’t answer several emails and texts sent by The Pilot over the past two weeks requesting an interview and asking how many law enforcement agencies are using the company’s program. 1, 2019, and January of this year, according to The Times story. The Norfolk Police Department was one of more than 600 law enforcement agencies that, without public scrutiny, started using Clearview between Jan. 18 New York Times story headlined “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It.” The system - powered by 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 built by the United States government or Silicon Valley heavyweights, according to a Jan. In the three months they used Clearview, Norfolk gang detectives uploaded photos of unknown people and suspects to the company’s app, which then spit out public photos of those people, along with links to where those photos appeared. and Courtney Doyle didn’t respond to several voicemails, texts, and emails sent over the past five months. Councilwoman Angelia Williams Graves said she knew the department was using Clearview, but couldn’t remember when she heard about it, or from whom. Investigators in the nation’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies are often able to unilaterally adopt whatever investigative tools they want, whether or not they’ve been rigorously tested by scientists or other law enforcement professionals.įive of eight Norfolk city council members said they didn’t know police were using Clearview until a Pilot reporter told them: Mayor Kenny Alexander, Andria McClellan, Mamie Johnson, Paul Riddick and Tommy Smigiel. E-Pilot Evening Edition Home Page Close Menu ![]()
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