Clearview: Glasses With Facial Recognition Are Here—And The Air Force Is Buying

Clearview AI, the facial recognition company backed by Facebook and Palantir investor Peter Thiel, has been contracted to provide the U.S. Air Force with augmented reality glasses combined with facial recognition.

It’s a technology that had many privacy activists concerned when it was first proposed by the company, as revealed in a New York Times article in 2020, which analyzed the startup’s code and found it was designed to work with glasses. Clearview had already raised alarms in harvesting billions of images of people’s faces from social media sites like Facebook, creating a massive database for law enforcement and private buyers to identify individuals.

The contract with the Air Force is just $50,000 and promises to help protect “airfields with augmented reality facial recognition glasses.” From the contracting records, first highlighted by Jack Poulson from technology industry accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry, there’s little more information on just how many pairs of glasses will be provided or how they will be used.

The Air Force hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. “We hold the Air Force in high esteem and would be honored to work with them in ways that meet their needs,” said Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That, an Australian entrepreneur who founded the company with backing from Thiel in 2017. His company faced severe criticism from privacy advocates since it was forced out of stealth in 2020 by media reports, with the American Civil Liberties Union suing the business to “bring an end to the company’s unlawful, privacy-destroying surveillance activities.” Chief amongst the concerns is that people’s faces have been put in databases that can be checked by law enforcement, even though they’ve never been linked to a crime, while facial recognition systems have long been criticized for being racially bias with cases of mistaken identity (and therefore mistaken suspicion) more common amongst Black and non-white ethnicities.

Despite the controversies around Clearview, it’s continued to get work with the U.S. federal government. Contract records show the FBI made an $18,000 order for a one-year subscription in December, while Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has put at least $1.5 million on the table for Clearview tools for an unspecified number of enterprise licenses.

“Since September, the Biden Administration’s ICE has more than doubled spending on Clearview AI, the FBI has publicly procured Clearview AI for the first time, the USPTO granted Clearview’s patent for augmented reality facial recognition, and now the company has a small business grant with the Air Force for augmented reality,” Poulson told Forbes, highlighting how successful Ton-That’s business has been, even with the negative press surrounding its collection of citizens’ facial images.

The company raised an additional $30 million last year, showing investors also haven’t been deterred, while the private market for facial recognition tech looks to be a lucrative one. Reporting from Buzzfeed previously revealed that private companies including the NBA, Macy’s and Walmart had used Clearview’s facial recognition.

It should perhaps come as no surprise the augmented reality tech is being sold to a government agency. As Forbes reported last year, facial recognition is being applied in myriad ways, including via drones and other unmanned vehicles. In 2020, OneZero reported the U.S. Air Force gave $2 million to RealNetworks, best known for video-streaming software RealPlayer, to put facial recognition on drones and body-worn cameras.