Thread by @msbellows

This story about Clearview, a private facial recognition service, gets scarier + scarier the more you read. Quotes in order:

"...its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business."
nytimes.com/2020/01/18/tec…
1/

"At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media..."
2/

"In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook."
3/

(Later: "Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board.")

(Clearview violated Facebook's TOS by scraping images, but Facebook's doing nothing in response.)
4/

"Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials"

"The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general."
5/

"One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described 'pro-white' Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use 'unconventional databases' for 'extreme opposition research'."
6/

"the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them."
7/

*When I used my hand to cover my nose and the bottom of my face, the app still returned seven correct matches for me."

We need a privacy law a.s.a.p.
8/8