Hoan Ton-That—Ton-That built and scaled facial recognition system by scraping billions of images from the internet without consent
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.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surveillance Technology | +toward | primary | -1.00 |
| User Privacy | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | -1.180 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (critical ×2) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
New York Times exposed Clearview AI mass scraping of billions of facial images
The New York Times published an investigative report titled 'The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It' revealing that Clearview AI had scraped billions of images from Facebook, YouTube, and millions of other websites to build a facial recognition database used by law enforcement, all without public knowledge or consent.