Hoan Ton-That
Hoan Ton-That
Hoan Ton-That is the founder of Clearview AI, a technology company that produces facial recognition software law enforcement agencies.[15]
Career
In 2009, Ton-That created a site that let people share links to videos with all the contacts in their instant messengers. Ton-That shut it down after it was branded a “phishing scam.” In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which added President Trump’s haircut to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing program.[15]
Ton-That moved to New York in 2016. Tall and slender, with long black hair, he considered a modeling career, he said, but after one shoot he returned to trying to figure out the next big thing in tech. He began reading academic papers on artificial intelligence, image recognition and manchine learning.[15]
Ton-That met Richard Schwartz in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together and created Clearview AI. Richard Schwartz was an aide to Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. Clearview AI was later backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.[15]
Clearview AI
Created in 2016, Clearview AI has a massive database. The company claims to have scraped more than 3 billion photos from the internet, including from popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Clearview retains those photos in its database even after users delete them from the platforms or make their accounts private. Clearview sells access to its database to law enforcement agencies, so those agencies can match unknown faces to other images.[17]
By the end of 2017, the company had a facial recognition tool, which it called Smartcheckr.
Even after a second funding round in 2019, Clearview remains tiny, having raised $7 million from investors, according to PitchBook, a website that tracks investments in start-ups.[15]