#Clearview windows milwaukee code

At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me.

For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”Ĭlearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.Īnd it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

#Clearview windows milwaukee code

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw.

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “ in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.īut without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. 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.