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'I'd never seen such an audacious attack on anonymity before': Clearview AI and the creepy tech that can identify you with a single picture

"Concerns about facial recognition had been building for decades. And now the nebulous bogeyman had finally found its form: a small company with mysterious founders and an unfathomably large database."

My source had unearthed a legal memo marked "Privileged & Confidential" in which a lawyer for Clearview had said that the company had scraped billions of photos from the public web, including social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to create a revolutionary app. Throughout my career, at places such as Forbes and Gizmodo, I had covered major new offerings from billion-dollar companies: Facebook automatically tagging your friends in photos; Apple and Google letting people look at their phones to unlock them; digital billboards from Microsoft and Intel with cameras that detected age and gender to show passers-by appropriate ads. But in this confidential legal memo, Clearview's high-profile lawyer, Paul Clement, who had been the solicitor general of the United States under President George W. Bush, claimed to have tried out the product with attorneys at his firm and "found that it returns fast and accurate search results."

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