Detective Johnson, HEAT Unit.
We received a tip that there was potentially
a juvenile that was being sex trafficked.
We had to figure out,
one, is this in fact a juvenile?
And if it is,
we need to drop everything that we do
to get her recovered as soon as possible.
Without utilizing facial recognition,
it makes identifying these juveniles nearly impossible.
- When Clearview came along,
that allowed us to search and to identify who they are,
where they are.
- We were able to take one of the photographs
from the online advertisement, upload it into Clearview,
and within seconds Clearview was able
to identify that individual.
- I can attest for hundreds of kids
that were identified using facial recognition technology.
- It was a 16-year-old female juvenile
who was being sex trafficked.
We were able to get her immediately recovered
out of the life, surrounded by resources,
and her trafficker is currently sitting in prison.
- My name's Kevin Metcalf,
I'm the President and Founder
of the National Child Protection Task Force.
We are an all-volunteer group.
Everybody brings whatever tools they have
with a focus on finding children who are in trouble.
I got into prosecuting these cases,
and I just saw the horror that these kids had to endure.
The investigators working the missing kid cases
are underfunded under-resourced, and overwhelmed.
So that really became a passion for me,
to figure out how can we do this better,
and how can we do it faster?
When you're dealing with child exploitation,
a lot of times,
the only thing that we have is the face of a child.
It's really pointless to run a, you know,
four or five-year-old child
through a driver's license database or mugshots.
They're not gonna be there.
So when Clearview came along,
that allowed us to search the faces of children.
And that is our last hope-
That's the last chance this child has to be recovered.
- My name is Hoan Ton-That,
I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Clearview AI.
Clearview AI is a facial recognition search engine.
When I was a kid,
I was obsessed with electronics and computers.
I'd be reading a lot of stuff on AI,
especially around image recognition.
The issues with the previous stuff,
you'd have to get a perfectly aligned face.
It wasn't accurate across all these different demographics.
I'm a person of mixed race-
Accuracy on this kind of technology is important to me.
In my mind, I was like, "That could be a solvable problem."
We had this really amazing moment
where we would try a new neural network.
Every single time, it would find the right person,
different angles, with masks and glasses.
And that's when I realized we made the huge breakthrough
in terms of accuracy.
We're 99% accurate across all demographics,
and it can pick a photo out of 12 million
with a 99.85% accuracy.
And that's when we knew that we had to then find the best
and highest purpose for the technology itself.
Originally, we were like,
"We don't really wanna sell to police or government,"
but it wasn't until we give it to law enforcement,
that it was really that 'wow' moment.
- Once officers started getting access
to the technology,
the word spread so fast.
Seeing them deploy it through trials and pilots,
and the successes they were getting so quickly.
As we're starting to receive feedback,
we're learning that most of these investigators
are in the crimes against children's space.
Being able to take an unidentified child
that's being abused online and determine who they are-
that's a needle in a haystack.
So that's when we started realizing, victims,
that's where we're having a huge impact.
- One of the important things to understand
about Clearview AI,
it only searches public information, right?
We take a photo of a face that you upload
and we turn it into a vector,
which is about 512 points
that the neural network extracts out.
That vector, then, we search through an index
of billions of photos on the internet.
Then, we get all the metadata information,
the title, the link, where it was found originally,
and return it back to the user.
- My name is Chris Johnson.
I'm a Detective with the Reno Police Department.
and currently I'm assigned to the Northern Nevada
Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit.
We only have a certain window in order
to identify these victims, and get these victims recovered
before they move on.
Traditionally, it was very tedious
and it didn't quite always result
in a positive identification.
It could take hours, it could take days.
- The longer it takes to identify a child
and pull them out of that environment that they're in,
the less childhood they have left.
It's fading away minute by minute.
- The ability to utilize facial recognition
to help identify victims allows us to utilize
our victim advocate to initiate resources immediately
after they're recovered to get them out of the life
and where they need to be.
- Any new technology has some level of controversy.
With Clearview AI,
we welcome regulation in facial recognition technology.
It's really important for us to get this right,
so we have strong auditing features
and many other controls in place to make sure
that the technology's really used
for the law enforcement use case.
- Any time that we do a search,
we have to have our commission number,
or a case number attached to that,
and the reason for our search.
And so that's able to be audited by supervisors
to make sure that we're not misusing it.
- What I've been able to discover is a real mission
about having technology deployed for a public good
and a public purpose.
- When you're talking about an algorithm
that is performing at
almost 100% accuracy rates,
then you're talking about a scenario
where you can have better policing,
better public safety and situations that you can resolve
that you couldn't resolve before.
- This work, you truly are helping people.
You are truly getting these victims out of the life,
getting them help.
- You cannot work in this for any length of time
and come out undamaged.
It's not the low-hanging fruit.
It's not the stuff that's really easy to do,
but what's gonna happen if we stop trying?