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Industry | Facial recognition |
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Headquarters | New York City , United States |
Key people | Hoan Ton-That |
Website | www![]() |
Clearview AI is a face recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That that has developed technology to match faces to a database of more than three billion faces indexed from Internet social media websites and other sources.[1]
Clearview AI operated in relative secrecy until 2019.[2] Its investors include Peter Thiel.[1] Clearview's technology has been used by numerous law enforcement agencies.[3][4]
US senators expressed their concerns about the possibility of abuse of the face recognition technology and the destruction of citizens' anonymity, and promised to find ways to prevent this from happening. Also, Twitter protested against the use of its data by Clearview.[5]
Ton-That previously created HappyAppy and ViddyHo, a phishing application or computer worm that spammed a users' contacts. Thon-That was sought by the police when this worm spread in 2009.[6][7] [8][9][10] He then created fastforwarded.com, a similar phishing site.[11] He also created an app to place Donald Trump's hair on photos.[1]
References
- ^ a b c Hill, Kashmir (2020-01-18). "The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
- ^ "Law enforcement is using a facial recognition app with huge privacy issues". Engadget. Retrieved 2020-01-21.
- ^ Lipton, Beryl (January 18, 2020). "Records on Clearview AI reveal new info on police use". MuckRock. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Brieskorn, Megan Cruz, Katlyn (December 27, 2019). "Florida law enforcement agencies use facial recognition to identify alleged thief". WFTV. Retrieved 2020-01-18.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "Twitter demands AI company stops 'collecting faces'". BBC News. 23 January 2020.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "The person behind a privacy nightmare has a familiar face". SFChronicle.com. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
I wrote about Ton-That in February 2009 ("scathingly," Hill writes), when he was living in San Francisco, developing first Facebook and then iPhone apps. He made the news for creating ViddyHo, a website that tricked users into sharing access to their Gmail accounts — a hacking technique known as "phishing" — and then spammed their contacts on the Google Talk chat app. (The episode does not appear on Ton-That's sanitized personal website.)
- ^ "Phishing Attacks Increase After Gmail Outage". Redorbit. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
San Francisco police are searching for a man who reportedly registered the ViddyHo domain under the name Cam-Hoan Ton-That.
- ^ Snyder, Gabriel. "ViddyHo Worm Sweeping Through IM". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
Here's a bit of a public service announcement: If someone asks you over IM to "Hey check out this video!" they foolishly fell for the just-breaking ViddyHo virus. Don't follow them.
- ^ Thomas, Owen. "Was an 'Anarcho-Transexual Afro-Chicano' Behind the IM Worm?". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
Ton-That frequently posted on Twitter about going to Sugarlump, an overwroughtly hip San Francisco "coffee lounge" in a rough-hewn but gentrifying corner of the Mission District, the preferred neighborhood of twentysomething Web developers. HappyAppy's office address is listed as 25 Stillman Street, a classically South of Market location for a startup. (In fact, it was once the home of Socializr, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams's current company.)
- ^ "Internet Worm Linked to San Francisco Man | News | The Harvard Crimson". thecrimson.com. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
The site Venture Hacks lists Hoan Ton-That as the sole member of HappyAppy Inc, a relationship that was confirmed by Hoan's lawyer, Andre Gharakhanian of Silicon Legal Strategy.
- ^ Thomas, Owen. "'Anarcho-Transexual' Hacker Returns with New Scam Site". Gawker. Retrieved 23 January 2020.
Fastforwarded.com