In this excerpt from ‘Your Face Belongs to Us,’ Kashmir Hill digs into an app that could end privacy “as we know it”
Scalzo didn’t have to take Schwartz and Ton-That’s word for it. Sitting in the lobby of the hotel, Ton-That got out his iPhone, took Scalzo’s photo, and then ran it through the app. It found two photos of Scalzo — his headshots on LinkedIn and on the Kirenaga Partners website. Scalzo fell in love with the technology on the spot.
A month later, Leone texted again, saying he needed the app for an upcoming conference in Sun Valley, dubbed “Billionaire Summer Camp” by the press. “There are a lot of ceos and only first name tags,” Leone wrote. Ton-That gave Leone access again, still hopeful to get into his version of Harvard, but all he got was an email from a friend of Leone’s who also wanted to use Clearview. His name was Joe, and his email, saying that he might invest, was full of typos.
Catsimatidis had twenty-eight thousand contacts in his iPhone. He joked with the Clearview team that they needed to make a version of the software that came in the form of glasses, so that he could identify people he was supposed to know and not embarrass himself. He didn’t invest in the company, but he told them he would buy those glasses if they ever made them.
Clearview’s biggest problem was its misfit founders. Ton-That had a couple of liabilities: the Gawker articles about his being a hacker who had created a “worm” and online photos of him in a MAGA hat hanging out with the Trump crowd — just the sort of photos a tool like his was designed to unearth. Left-leaning investors were put off. And Schwartz, nearing sixty with the fashion sense of an ex-bureaucrat, wasn’t the kind of slick startup entrepreneur that investors felt they could trust.
He knew it was going to scare people, but he was convinced that they would come around. “Information is power. If we give information to individuals, then they can use their God-given talents in whatever way they choose,” he would later say.
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