She speaks to Buzzfeed technology reporter Caroline Haskins, private investigator and former NYPD detective Mark Pucci, and Georgetown University privacy and technology researcher Clare Garvie. So they had this person’s face. We don’t have a big ban on facial recognition.

But I need to really come up with a good answer for that.

We don’t need to give consent for people to process our faces. And they said, the company has told us not to talk to you.

But then they ran his face through Clearview’s app, and he turned up in the background of someone else’s gym selfie. And he’s usually pretty eccentric — like a lot of paisley shirts, he’s at Burning Man.But in person he was very conservative. Imagine you’re a protester in the U.S. or in a more authoritarian regime. But do you get the sense that he’s thinking at all about privacy?So I asked him, you know, this is a very powerful app.

And so then that made me go back to the earlier officers who had run my photo. It would mean that if you were at a bar and someone saw you and was interested in you, they could take your photo, run your face through the app, and then it pulls up all these photos of you from the internet. And one of the investors in the company is this venture capital firm that has an office in Bronxville, New York.

It’s the nerdiest thing ever. Background reading: Federal and state law enforcement officers are using one company’s app to make arrests in 49 states. You would have to assume anyone can know who you are any time they’re able to take a photo of your face.And so that technology is what this company is pitching these police departments?And what do you know about this company at this point?So at this point, all I really know is that the company is called Clearview AI.

And they say, we are. So the pitch is that you can take a picture of a criminal suspect, put their face into this app and identify them in seconds.And when you read this memo, what do you make of what this company is offering?So I’ve been covering privacy for 10 years, and I know that a technology like this in public hands is the nightmare scenario.This has been a tool that was too taboo for Silicon Valley giants who were capable of building it.

Show more I am recently back from the Luberon in Provence, where I spent a glorious week "en famille." I’m like, I cannot believe this is another dead end.So phone and email are not working for me. Law enforcement has guns, but not everybody has a gun. I just don’t —Hoan seems to be saying, yeah, there’s pressure on us to sell to private consumers, but we’re not going to do that.

Law enforcement is such a small market. And how reasonable is it to think that he has control or the company has control at this point over where this technology goes?I mean, one point that I made when I was talking to him is that oftentimes, the tools that law enforcement use end up in the hands of the public.I just — I personally feel like you guys have opened the door to now this becoming more normalized, just because a lot of tools that law enforcement have eventually make their way into public hands.Not always.

And he wants to be the next big app guy.Being there is a lot different from reading about it online. If this app were made publicly available, it would be the end of being anonymous in public.

Whether you work in the public or private sector, anywhere in the world, the Summit is your can't-miss event.Find answers to your privacy questions from keynote speakers and panellists who are experts in Canadian data protection.World-class discussion and education on the top privacy issues in Asia Pacific and around the globe. Because I was like, this is what I do — technology. [LAUGHS] Why did you do that?

It would mean that if you were at a bar and someone saw you and was interested in you, they could take your photo, run your face through the app, and then it pulls up all these photos of you from the internet. Google in 2011 said that they could release a tool like this, but it was the one technology they were holding back because it could be used in a very bad way.And why exactly is this kind of technology this line in the sand that no one will cross?