The Company That Already Has Your Face

Our Take

Cyber Casebook's rundown of Clearview AI lands on a point we keep hammering on here: a wrongful arrest based on a black-box algorithm isn't a bug in the system, it's the business model. Randal Reid's ordeal in Georgia is what happens when police departments quietly buy access to a tool nobody outside a small circle of vendors and cops actually understands, then treat its output as ground truth. Clearview built its empire by scraping billions of photos without consent; Flock Safety builds its empire by bolting cameras onto every pole and intersection it can find. Different biometric, same playbook — mass collection first, accountability never.

What really jumps out is the pattern of denial and discovery: Canadian officials said they weren't using Clearview, then investigators found hundreds of searches anyway. That's the same story we hear constantly about ALPR networks — city councils and residents told a system is narrowly scoped for stolen cars or Amber Alerts, only to later learn the data is shared with ICE, sold to who-knows-who, or queried thousands of times a month for garden-variety policing. Secrecy isn't an accident in these deployments, it's a feature.

Facial recognition and license plate readers are converging fast, and the public almost never gets a vote before either shows up in their town. Credit to Cyber Casebook for tracing Clearview's arc from Kashmir Hill's original exposé to the 2025 settlement — go watch the full video below. Then check our camera map to see what's already watching your commute, and hit take action if you want to push back before your city becomes the next case study.