Your Face Belongs to Us

A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

By: Kashmir Hill

Narrated by: Kashmir Hill

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it

“The dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Wired

Winner of the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award • Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.

Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

©2023 Kashmir Hill (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“As I read Your Face Belongs to Us, it dawned on me that the dystopian future portrayed in some science-fiction movies is already upon us. Whether you like it or not, your face has already been scraped from the internet, stored in a giant database, and made available to law enforcement agencies, private corporations, and authoritarian governments to track and surveil you. Kashmir Hill’s fascinating book brings home the scary implications of this new reality.”—John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood

“Kashmir Hill all but invented the tech dystopia beat, and no one is a more exuberant and enjoyable guide to the dark corners of our possible future than she is. Reaching deep into the past to paint a terrifying portrait of our future, Hill’s thorough, awe-inspiring reporting and compelling storytelling paint a fascinating tale of tech’s next chapter. This is the most fun you can have reading a real-life nightmare.”—Garrett Graff, author of The Only Plane in the Sky

A tight, well told story about the future having already arrived.

I first heard Kashmir outline this story on Fresh Air. Diving in deeper with her has been an informative, if disturbing, treat. She’s a direct and vivid writer and her voice has that special lure reserved for great storytellers. She looks at the delineations and limits of what our privacy may have been and how even the pretense of privacy is now dissolving in the brine of Social sharing. We’ve all put ourselves out there and we thought it was all for our own edification. But nothing’s free. We’ve sold our faces to the human catalogue. Ultimately, Kashmir’s story is an important one about how we’ve surrendered our privacy to a digital domain that is the ripe field of AI’s learning. And once learned, AI’s not going to forget…

Outstanding

Assuming there will be a movie because it’s just that good. Found it by Marketplace podcast, couldn’t stop listening .

Very disturbing and eye opening

Loved it. What's really shocking is the fact that we cannot do anything to stop this. It is virtually impossible to be anonymous anymore.

Eye opening

I have been reading articlesab this for years. When this book came out i had to get it. I took awhile to read it but it was very fascinating. Some of the stuff I heard about, others, I haven’t. Very interesting! Keep up the great work!

Eye opening history of visual digital privacy

A must read for anyone who works in tech. Offers context for everything on the horizon in AI et al.

Insightful

Excellent book and cautionary tail of a very real future and now is the time to think how to react to the fast moving wave

Well researched

The book really brought the focus on facial recognition into context with extensive history and existing databases and information on the main company that perfected this tool. Eye opening work

Kinda of disorganized

It has a central story and a history of how this technology came about throughout the ages. It’s kinda weird that one chapter is about one topic then the next is about the other topic then it just keeps alternating. I honestly think it’s because the main story is kinda drawn out way too long. The switching back and forth makes it a little more tolerable. But honestly they should have just trimmed some of the fat and keep the two topics separate. It’s a little annoying listing to a story in 2016 then early 1900s then 2016 then late 1900 then 2016 then early 2000s etc etc. The topic is still interesting.

Great read!

A topic I did not understand written in a way that was fascinating and accessible with the twists and turns of novel. Highly recommended!

Must read/listen book

Worth every minute, so much insight and given in context of historical technology that allows the reader to understand that facial recognition is not going away and will be available to many different segments of our society.