Hoan Ton-That

Hoan Ton-That (* approx. 1989 in Australia ) is an Australian software programmer. He is the founder and CEO of the US start-up Clearview AI .

Career

Hoan Ton-That was born in Australia and is of Vietnamese descent. In 2007 he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco, where he had some less than successful business ideas in the field of social media applications - such as the Trump Hair app he developed in 2015 , with which users can see the characteristic hairstyle of the American in their photos President Donald Trump could miss.

In 2016 he moved to New York and gave up his attempt to start a career as a model there after a short time. Instead, he started looking at artificial intelligence , machine learning, and facial recognition .

With the help of supporters, he got into the face recognition business. The American investor of German origin, Peter Thiel, is one of the sponsors of the start-up Clearview AI he founded in 2017 .

At the beginning of 2020, Ton-That made a public statement for the first time on the criticism of the perfection and commercialization of facial recognition and the associated dangers to privacy, which had been strongly expressed in the USA. He explained that Clearview AI had developed a prototype for augmented reality glasses with which it would theoretically be possible to automatically identify any person on the street. The glasses could then display the name and other details about the person, for example, if their faces are in the database. Clearview AI has no plans to bring the glasses onto the market.

Web links

Hon Ton-That website
Alisa Schröter: Clearview: The man with the three billion faces . In: Zeit Online , February 2, 2020.

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d Kashmir Hill: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It . In: The New York Times . January 18, 2020 ( nytimes.com [accessed January 29, 2020]).
↑ Clearview AI , PitchBook, accessed January 26, 2020
↑ Face recognition: Company identifies billions of people. January 20, 2020, accessed January 28, 2020 .

personal data
SURNAME	Ton-That, Hoan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Australian software programmer and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH	around 1989

[NYT2020-1] Kashmir Hill: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It . In: The New York Times . January 18, 2020 ( nytimes.com [accessed January 29, 2020]).

[2] Clearview AI , PitchBook, accessed January 26, 2020

[3] Face recognition: Company identifies billions of people. January 20, 2020, accessed January 28, 2020 .