Kashmir Hill

Kashmir Hill’s coverage of the intersection of privacy and technology pioneered the genre. As a technology reporter at the New York Times, she dives into the myriad ways our devices have infiltrated our personal lives, and how we can avoid the looming tech dystopia. Just how much of our personal data is for sale? How can we maintain our privacy? And is it even possible to avoid Big Tech? Hill approaches all of these questions with a reporter’s curiosity and immersive, boots-on-the-ground research.

Her personable, eye-opening talks bring audiences inside her research, where she often uses herself as a human guinea pig in experiments on the intersection of technology and privacy. A talented speaker who has spoken at TED, Aspen Ideas Festival, and numerous universities and events, Hill reveals the extent to which we are tracked by the Big Five—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—and how users can prepare themselves for a future in which anonymity is an increasingly impossible pursuit.

Kashmir Hill’s book, Your Face Belongs to Us, is a gripping true story about the rise of Clearview AI, the ground-breaking startup behind radical person-finding technology that giants in the field, including Google and Facebook, had deemed taboo. Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app that claimed it could identify anyone with 99 percent accuracy based on just one snapshot of their face and, within seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it were everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, opening the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Your Face Belongs to Us serves as an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”

Before the New York Times, Kashmir Hill worked and wrote for several publications, including Gizmodo Media Group, Forbes, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Popular Science, Above the Law, and many others. She has degrees from Duke University and New York University, where she studied journalism. In 2018, she received the Technology in Journalism Award from the National Press Foundation for her work on “The House That Spied On Me,” along with her cowriter, Surya Mattu.

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