Clearview AI

Clearview AI is an American facial-recognition company founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz that built its database by scraping an estimated thirty billion images from social-media platforms and the open web, and sold facial-identification searches to law-enforcement agencies, government clients, and, in its early period, private actors. The Federal Trade Commission issued a consent order in March 2022 barring Clearview from selling or giving away access to its database to private entities and requiring deletion of data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company violated consumer-privacy law. Peter Thiel was the company's first investor, providing seed funding before Clearview was even named (when it operated under the name Smart Checker), and the conservative provocateur Charles Johnson played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel.¹²³

Founding and the Thiel Seed Investment

Hoan Ton-That, an Australian-born software developer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and political operative, founded Clearview AI in 2016-2017. The New York Times reported in March 2021 that Peter Thiel provided the seed funding for the company before it was even called Clearview AI, when it operated under the name Smart Checker. NPR confirmed in 2023 that Thiel was Clearview's first investor. Clearview was funded directly by Thiel rather than through Founders Fund.¹²⁴

The company's product is a facial-recognition search engine. A user uploads a photograph of a face, and the software searches the scraped-image database to return matching images and their source URLs. The database was built by automated scraping of public-facing images across social-media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others) and the open web. The platforms' terms of service prohibited the scraping; Clearview conducted it anyway. By 2020 the database was reported to contain over three billion images; by 2023, over thirty billion.¹³

Charles Johnson and the Hidden Cofounder Role

Charles Johnson, described by the New York Times as a "notorious conservative provocateur," played a pivotal early role alongside Thiel in the company's formation. Johnson was a far-right media figure known for promoting debunked conspiracy theories (including the false claim that President Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice had directed surveillance of the Trump campaign) and for his 2017 announcement that he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads."¹⁵⁶

Johnson subsequently claimed to be a Clearview cofounder and sued the company for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025. The Semafor reporting (October 2024) documented a separate lawsuit alleging Johnson was "running a fraud and extortion scheme" and falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent. Johnson had also indicated he was a federal informant, as reported through the federal lawsuit against Clearview. The Johnson-Thiel relationship extends beyond Clearview: Johnson disclosed to the FBI that Thiel himself was an FBI informant, per the Business Insider reporting of October 2023, which documented Thiel's status as a confidential human source for the FBI.⁵⁶⁷

The FTC Consent Order and the Regulatory Record

The FTC issued its consent order against Clearview in March 2022. The order barred Clearview from selling or giving away access to its facial-recognition database to any private entity and required the deletion of images and data collected from consumers, settling allegations that the company's practices violated consumer-privacy law. The FTC found that Clearview had collected facial images without consent, had marketed the product to private entities (including a reported outreach to a Macy's executive and the use of the product by a Kohl's loss-prevention team), and had failed to implement adequate privacy safeguards.³⁸

The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) produced a separate settlement in May 2022, in which Clearview agreed to restrict its use of collected face images in Illinois and to honor an opt-out mechanism for residents. The company withdrew from the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada after regulatory action in each jurisdiction. The combined regulatory record left Clearview's law-enforcement and government business intact while constraining its commercial and international operations.⁸⁹

Law-Enforcement and Government Use

Clearview's documented law-enforcement client base includes over a million searches conducted as of March 2023, per the Consumer Watchdog report. The company's product has been used by municipal police departments, federal agencies, and international law-enforcement bodies. The BuzzFeed News investigation documented that Clearview's secret early users included a former Trump staffer, conservative think tanks, and a range of private actors beyond the law-enforcement client base the company publicly acknowledged.³¹⁰

The ICE and the DHS are among the documented federal clients. The Clearview product supplies the same identity-resolution-from-public-data function that Palantir's Gotham platform supplies from classified and government-held data, and the two firms' products operate in adjacent segments of the federal surveillance infrastructure. Senator Ed Markey wrote to Ton-That in November 2023 raising civil-liberties concerns about the Clearview system's use, and the senator's letter is part of the public congressional record.³¹¹