Book Selection: Your Face Belongs to us

Hello everyone,

Welcome to another book selection here on the blog. This time, after an absence of reading and or listening to books, I’ve already started this one. Its titled Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It and its author and reader is Kashmir Hill.

As a side note, Terry and I are both reading this one, and I’m in chapter 2 and its a 25 chapter 3 part book. Its reading length is 10 hours and was released on the 19th of this month.

My first thoughts are two words. Holy shit. You’ll have to read the prologue to get an understanding on why these two words describe the book to date.

Now, let’s tell you what the book is about, directly from Amazon.

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

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 offeringit 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.”

You can probably see if the book is elsewhere, but per usual, we’re linking to Amazon which has Kindle, hardcover and audio. Enjoy this one!

We’ll have more soon. See you later!