PRIVACY? IT’S A RELIC

Hoan TonThat invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person along with links to where those photos appeared.

The system — whose backbone is a database of more than 3 billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the US government or Silicon Valley giants.

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York

Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. (Cue in your spy movie jokes)

More than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list.

Federal law enforcement, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, are trying it, as are Canadian law enforcement authorities, according to the company.

One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images

Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Ton-That, using a fake name, according to the NYT report.