From A New York Times article about the data company Clearview:
… his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize… Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
– Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich
In the Industrial Age, we had asymmetry of production as the divide between the haves and the haves-not. In the Financial Age, it was asymmetry of raw capital. In the Internet Age it’s going to be asymmetry of information. You can have little money, no physical assets. But you can punch way, way above your weight with access – legal or illegal – to the right data.