The future sure does seem frightening. The New York Times has a fascinating and terrifying article about Clearview AI, a startup behind a facial recognition algorithm/app with a database of photos 3 billion strong and growing. According to the article, the company relies heavily on scraping images from Facebook.

Clearview’s main clients right now are law enforcement entities. That alone is worrying. But it’s only a matter of time before these sorts of things become public tools.

I hesitate to link to articles behind paywalls. It can be frustrating to see something you might want to read, follow a link, and then get denied. I think the NYT offers a certain number of articles free per week. If you can’t read it and would like to, I can check to see if I’m able to email a copy through the NYT. I thought the author – Kashmir Hill – did an excellent job.

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.