3/1/2024 0 Comments Clearview movie timesScalzo had been chatting with an insurance broker about startups, and she mentioned one doing facial recognition. Scalzo’s approach was to find a fresh tech startup with a working product and to write a check for $1 million or less, enough to give the founders a little runway to take off from but not enough to coast. It had a smaller stack of chips and had to place them wisely. Unlike the big Silicon Valley players, it didn’t have billions of dollars to throw around. He now had his own small investment firm, Kirenaga Partners. In his midforties, Scalzo had a tech background but had made a career in finance, working at a series of big-name investment banks on Wall Street, including Bear Stearns before it imploded during the 2008 recession. VENTURE CAPITALIST DAVID SCALZO came across Clearview AI in the summer of 2018. If we stay on our current path - and American lawmakers don’t pass stronger privacy laws - this may be a kind of app that we all have on our phones: a Shazam for people. Clearview’s database now has 30 billion faces in it. They all had this superpower on their phone, allowing them to put a name to a face and dig up online photos of someone that the person might not even realize were online. Billionaires, Silicon Valley investors, and a few high-wattage celebrities. Thousands of police departments around the world were secretly using the app but no one seemed to know about it.Īs I dug further into Clearview AI for my new book, Your Face Belongs to Us, I discovered that in fact, some very wealthy and powerful people were among the first to know it existed. Upload a stranger’s photo to Clearview’s app and it reveals online photos of them, with links to where they can be found. The tiny start-up had scraped 3 billion faces from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites without anyone’s consent to build a groundbreaking facial recognition app. When I first broke the story of Clearview AI in The New York Times in January 2020, people were shocked.
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