The secret face-scraping company, exposed
2020Kashmir 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.
Board member / lead investor (Kirenaga Partners)
Managing partner of early-stage VC firm Kirenaga Partners, which led Clearview AI's $30M Series B round. He became an outspoken backer after testing the app on himself and is one of the company's most public investors.
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.