Your Face Belongs to Us

Hill's book grew out of her own 2020 New York Times investigation that first exposed Clearview AI, and reviewers credited that origin for the book's reporting depth: she traces founder Hoan Ton-That and adviser Richard Schwartz building a facial-recognition database off billions of scraped photos, backed by controversial figures including Charles C. Johnson and Peter Thiel, then sold quietly to police departments before the public knew it existed. Critics framed the book less as a tech-industry exposé than as a document of how quickly a bedrock assumption — that your face is not a searchable identifier — collapsed with almost no legal pushback. It was named a best book of the year by the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wired, with reviewers emphasizing Hill's direct access to the founders as what distinguishes it from other AI-privacy books.