Disputed co-founder (SmartCheckr predecessor)
Far-right activist and provocateur who says he co-founded Clearview's predecessor entity SmartCheckr and introduced Hoan Ton-That to Peter Thiel at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He sued the company claiming an ownership stake; he later dropped the suit and Clearview's counterclaims remain ongoing.
Kashmir Hill revealed that Clearview had quietly scraped billions of photos and sold facial-recognition search to police — a company almost no one had heard of, already used by hundreds of agencies.
An ACLU suit under Illinois' biometric-privacy law ended with Clearview permanently barred from selling its faceprint database to most private companies nationwide.
Regulators in France, Italy, Greece, the U.K., and Australia ruled Clearview's scraping unlawful and levied multi-million-euro fines and deletion orders.
A leaked client list showed Clearview had been tried or used by thousands of police departments, the FBI, ICE, and even retailers — often without public knowledge or oversight.