Basically it is a search engine for faces. So you upload a photo of a face and it finds publicly available links that are online. And right now it's used for law enforcement to solve crimes after the fact. So an officer, if they're stuck on a case and they have something from video footage, they ...

A false positive in a live setting is more of an issue than it is in an after the fact setting. Because if you're getting an alert and you're running down to find the person, you have maybe a lot less time to see if it's correct. Whereas if you're behind a desk doing an investigation, you have al...

LinkedIn's a billion dollar company, or trillion dollar company Microsoft, they don't have the right to block other people's access to public data. So it's a thing that is just kind of in an interesting spot because it is only searching publicly available information and things ...

So already in a lot of law enforcement agencies that use facial recognition, they have a procedure saying you cannot just arrest someone based on a facial recognition match. You still have to do follow up research. So there's always a human in the loop that checks is this person, the right person...

How do you search billions of faces or vectors in under a second? Typical databases lookup by name and email. This looks up by similarity. And doing that at scale is hard. We had to get our own data center as well for that. Typically if you're buying a facial recognition system, there's a cold st...

We're still not even 1% of what's out there when you run the numbers, it's kind of crazy how much information is out there. So when it comes to privacy, we kind of have to look at ourselves and say, well, we are voluntarily sharing a lot of this information. Google has your location on Android al...

He says the company did its own audit, assembling an independent review board that took a similar approach to when the ACLU tested Amazon’s facial recognition system by running photos of the US Congress past a mugshot database—which are photos of people who’ve been arrested for a crime.

But what about folks who are falsely accused? 

Ton-That would argue that’s a human failing. In the same way we’re still responsible for how we drive while using GPS—when the navigation says “turn right” and it’s not safe to do so—it’s up to us and our human brains to ignore it.

And he...

So a neural network is a newer form of artificial intelligence where instead of hard coding factors like the distance between your eyes or the distance between the eyes and the nose, it just learns from a ton of different examples. And what we do is we collect like a thousand examples of George C...