30 Billion Faces Later Hoan Ton-That Is Out

Hoan Ton-That started out creating quirky apps, one let users slap Donald Trump’s signature hair onto selfies, another helped share videos through instant messenger. But those digital oddities were just the prelude to something far more consequential and controversial.

In 2017, the Australian coder-turned-entrepreneur quietly co-founded Clearview AI, a company whose facial recognition software would soon redraw the lines of privacy and surveillance in the digital age. Clearview’s technology lets users upload a photo of any person and instantly uncover publicly available images of that individual scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of websites along with links to their online profiles.

What makes Clearview’s tool so potent is the scale. With a claimed database of over 30 billion faces, it far outstripped anything built by the U.S. government or Silicon Valley’s largest firms. It also crossed boundaries those companies have long avoided: Google once shelved similar capabilities, warning they could be “used in a very bad way.”

The AI behind Clearview is built on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), similar in architecture to what powers systems like FaceNet and DeepFace. The company trains its models on billions of publicly scraped images to generate facial embeddings, a kind of mathematical signature of a person’s face. When a user uploads a new photo, Clearview converts it into an embedding and compares it against its entire database using similarity metrics like cosine distance. This enables the system to return a ranked list of matching faces within seconds, even if the person’s image only ever appeared once online. The sheer size of the dataset gives it a matching accuracy that the company claims can reach 75%, though critics warn that independent benchmarking has been limited or absent.

Yet law enforcement quickly embraced it. Over 600 agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, reportedly used Clearview to investigate crimes ranging from shoplifting to child exploitation and murder. The company also began quietly licensing the app to private-sector clients—a fact Clearview didn’t advertise. Behind the scenes, Clearview operated in near-complete secrecy. Its website listed a fake Manhattan address. Its only LinkedIn employee, “John Good,” was Hoan Ton-That using a pseudonym. And when journalists began investigating, the company not only refused to comment—it began monitoring who law enforcement officers were searching for. Police who ran reporter photos through the app were soon contacted by Clearview representatives asking if they had spoken to the media.

Facial recognition has long sparked fears of racial bias, false positives, and “Big Brother”-style surveillance. In Clearview’s case, the risk was amplified by a lack of independent testing. “We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,” said Clare Garvie, a legal expert on facial recognition at Georgetown University. The company claims up to 75% match accuracy—but its dataset, built through scraping in violation of most platforms’ terms of service, has raised red flags. Civil liberties advocates warned that the app could be used to track protestors, out romantic partners, or help foreign governments identify dissidents. “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute.

But Clearview didn’t slow down. It even built prototype code to integrate facial recognition with augmented-reality glasses giving wearers the potential to identify every passerby in real time. Ton-That acknowledged developing it, but claimed the company had “no plans to release.” The underlying AI relied on deep convolutional neural networks, trained on billions of scraped images to create robust face embeddings. These embeddings were then compared with new uploads using cosine similarity, enabling near-instantaneous face matches from a global population scale.

Then came the legal backlash. Social platforms like Google, YouTube, and Twitter issued cease-and-desist letters. Lawmakers like Sen. Edward Markey called Clearview’s product “chilling.” IBM exited the facial recognition business altogether, and Amazon followed with a one-year moratorium on Rekognition while Ton-That singled out Amazon for “wrongful identifications” and claimed his own tool avoided such bias. “As a person of mixed race, this is especially important to me,” he said.

The ACLU sued Clearview under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), resulting in a 2022 settlement that barred Clearview from selling its services to private companies and individuals in the U.S. and required it to implement opt-outs for Illinois residents. That didn’t stop the international fallout. France, Germany, and Australia declared Clearview illegal. The U.K. fined the company £7.5 million and ordered it to delete U.K. citizen data. Italy issued a €20 million fine. And just this week, the Netherlands imposed a $30 million penalty, calling Clearview’s actions a violation of European privacy law. “If there is a photo of you online—and doesn’t that apply to all of us?—then you can end up in Clearview’s database and be tracked,” said Aleid Wolfsen, head of the Dutch regulator. He called the tech “highly intrusive,” saying it should only be deployed in “exceptional cases under strict oversight.”

Now, years after his invention captured headlines and lawsuits, Hoan Ton-That is out at the company he founded. After stepping down as CEO in December, he took a backseat role as president and board member. But this week, Clearview’s shareholders voted to remove him from the board entirely, according to Forbes. The ouster followed Ton-That’s recent move to Architect Capital, a private credit firm focused on “esoteric, tech-enabled assets,” where he joined as Chief Technology Officer. Ton-That had previously approached the Architect about providing debt financing for Clearview. That conversation may have laid the groundwork for his exit.

New co-CEO Hal Lambert, a former Trump campaign official and conservative commentator, now says Clearview is moving “in a different direction”—one that includes active discussions with the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and multiple federal agencies. The shift signals a full embrace of government and military contracts. The pivot comes as the company prepares a new equity funding round and positions itself as a core intelligence asset for national security.

Clearview’s legal saga is also nearing a turning point. A multi-district lawsuit over biometric privacy violations recently reached final settlement approval in U.S. court. Meanwhile, a pending case involving police use of Clearview without disclosure could shape how facial recognition is treated in American jurisprudence going forward.

For all its controversies, Clearview remains one-of-a-kind not least because it ignored the guardrails that Silicon Valley built around facial recognition. “A lot of people are doing it,” Ton-That once shrugged. “Facebook knows.”