Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill (born 1981) is a technology reporter at The New York Times known for making abstract privacy threats concrete. In January 2020 she broke the story of Clearview AI — “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It” — revealing that a tiny startup had scraped billions of face photos from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other sites without consent and was selling a recognition app to police departments.

Your Face Belongs to Us

Her 2023 book “Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It” (Random House) expanded the reporting into a history of facial recognition’s forbidden-fruit status — a technology giants like Google had held back that Clearview simply shipped. The book, shortlisted for the Royal Society’s 2024 Trivedi Science Book Prize, documents how the technology improved “in part because of us putting a whole bunch of photos online,” and follows people wrongfully arrested, as she put it, “for the crime of looking like someone else.”

Hill’s reporting triggered regulatory and legal consequences worldwide: European privacy regulators fined Clearview tens of millions of euros, and an ACLU lawsuit under Illinois’s biometric privacy law forced the company to stop selling its database to most private businesses in the United States. Her subsequent Times reporting has continued the beat — wrongful facial-recognition arrests, cars sharing driving data with insurers, and people forming relationships with chatbots.

Hill is a reporter, not a campaigner — she does not sign letters or call for bans. But her body of work functions as one long public warning: that AI-powered recognition has dismantled anonymity by default, and that the question of who operates the technology matters as much as the technology itself.