SLCL Authors @ the J and Novel Neighbor present New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill

The St. Louis County Library, the JCC of St. Louis and the Novel Neighbor are pleased to host an SLCL Authors @ the J event with New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill, author of  “Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secret Startup’s Quest to End Privacy As We Know It.” Presented by SLCL’s Westfall Politics & History Author Series.

The event will take place on Thursday September 28, at 7:00 p.m. at the JCC’s Staenberg Family Center – Mirowitz Performing Arts Center, 2 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, MO 63146. The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from The Novel Neighbor.

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face.  If it was everything it claimed to be, the app would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. 

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. “Your Face Belongs to Us” is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at The New York Times, where her writing about the intersection of privacy and technology pioneered the genre. Hill has worked and written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Gizmodo, Popular Science, Forbes, and many others.

Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.