Hoan Ton-That

Under Ton-That's leadership as CEO, Clearview AI accumulated over 90 million euros in GDPR fines from France (20M), Italy (20M), Greece (20M), and the Netherlands (30.5M) for illegally processing European citizens' biometric data. Despite explicit orders from multiple EU data protection authorities to cease operations and delete data, the company continued scraping and processing European data. Dutch DPA chairman Aleid Wolfsen stated they would investigate holding management personally liable.

Under Ton-That's leadership, Clearview AI aggressively expanded its facial recognition platform to more than 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the United States, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. By 2024, law enforcement searches via Clearview AI had doubled to 2 million annually. The expansion included a $9.2 million ICE contract in 2025, with ICE personnel using the system globally. This occurred despite wrongful identification cases, including Randal Quran Reid who spent six days in jail due to a mistaken Clearview match.

In May 2022, Clearview AI under Ton-That's leadership settled the ACLU's lawsuit filed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The settlement permanently banned Clearview from making its faceprint database available to most businesses and private entities nationwide, and barred sales to any Illinois entity including police for five years. A subsequent March 2025 class-action settlement granted class members a 23% equity stake in Clearview AI, valued at roughly $51.75 million, representing one of the largest biometric privacy settlements in history.

As co-founder and CEO of Clearview AI, Hoan Ton-That led the development of a facial recognition system that scraped over 10 billion (later 50+ billion) images from public internet sources including social media, news sites, and other platforms without individuals' knowledge or consent. The system operated in near-secrecy from 2017 until exposed by a January 2020 New York Times investigation. The database grew to become the largest known facial recognition database at 60+ billion images.

Hoan Ton-That personally pitched US Border Patrol on using Clearview AI to screen arriving migrants for 'sentiment about the USA,' proposing to scan social media for posts saying 'I hate Trump' or 'Trump is a puta' and targeting anyone with an 'affinity for far-left groups.' The proposal conflated support for Trump with American identity and would have used facial recognition to profile migrants based on political views.