“DO I WANT to live in a society where people can be identified secretly and at a distance by the government?” asks Alvaro Bedoya. “I do not, and I think I am not alone in that.”
Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says those words in New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill’s compelling new book, Your Face Belongs to Us. As Hill makes clear, we are headed toward the very world that Bedoya fears.
This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company’s existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could identify nearly anyone on the planet based only on a snapshot of their face.
ounders and investors, and they
