New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about an app from a company called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. But if true, it would be huge. Accurate facial recognition technology is 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 associate, and boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel--none of whom had any qualms about unleashing this society-altering technology on the public.

The app can scan a blurry portrait and, in just seconds, collect every detail of a person's online life. It can find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family, and even your home address (as well as photos of yourself that you might not have even known existed). Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. Google and Facebook decided that it was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the technology with private investors and contracting it out to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the United States. American law enforcement, including the Department of Homeland Security, has already used it to arrest people for everything from petty theft to assault. Without regulation, it could expand the reach of policing--as it has in China and Russia--to a terrifying, dystopian level.

Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and a warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, it is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called "the right to be let alone."