Illustration by Anthony Gerace In November 2019, the New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill received a tip that seemed “too outrageous to be true”. Freddy Martinez, an analyst at Open the Government, a pro-transparency non-profit, had passed her a legal memo he had unearthed about a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could identify almost anyone based on a snapshot of their face. Clearview had already sold its services to hundreds of police departments around the US but had tried to keep its existence secret. Clearview might have flown under the radar a little longer had this memo landed...