Editorial illustration for Clearview AI’s New Tool Lets Police Map Your Online Life
Clearview AI's New Tool Maps Your Complete Online Life
Clearview AI built its reputation, and its notoriety, on 3 billion scraped photos that let police match a face to a name. Now WIRED has learned the company is testing something further downstream: a tool called InquiryIQ that takes that name and builds out everything around it. Employers, aliases, associates, physical descriptions, whatever a search can surface, stitched into a profile.
The tool works by taking details an investigator already has and sending them across the open web, opening pages, scanning images, pulling together what it finds. Code reviewed by WIRED shows the interface prompting users to enter age, gender, and race, saying that data helps the system make "smarter decisions" while it searches. Clearview has not released InquiryIQ publicly, and the company declined to explain how those demographic details factor into its results.
One detail stands out: among the models Clearview tested to run InquiryIQ is SpaceXAI, the company behind Grok, merged with xAI back in February. Elon Musk has marketed Grok as a pushback against "woke" AI, and the chatbot has a track record of racist and inflammatory outputs, raising questions about what happens when that model is steering a police profiling tool.
Experts say InquiryIQ and tools like it could reshape police investigations by compressing days or weeks of detective work into minutes. That speed could help police solve crimes faster, but it also lowers the cost of fishing expeditions, making it practical to scrutinize people police might otherwise never have investigated.
Why this matters
Clearview built its business on scraping billions of faces without consent, then paid regulatory fines across Europe for it. InquiryIQ suggests the company wants to repeat that model for the rest of a person's digital footprint: associates, addresses, social posts, whatever a scraper can find and an AI can stitch into a profile. For builders working on retrieval, entity resolution, or agentic search, the technical shape of this tool is familiar.
What's unresolved is exactly what we should be watching. The internal files show interface code and feature descriptions, not the accuracy of the underlying matching or how false positives get flagged before they land in a police file. Clearview has a track record of overselling capability while dodging scrutiny of error rates.
Any team building identity or OSINT tools for law enforcement clients should treat this as a case study in what happens when deployment outpaces independent testing. The real story here isn't the existence of the tool. It's whether anyone outside Clearview gets to check its work before it's used against someone.
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Common Questions Answered
What is InquiryIQ and how does Clearview AI's new tool work?
InquiryIQ is a tool developed by Clearview AI that takes a person's name or initial details and automatically searches across the open web to build a comprehensive profile. The tool aggregates information about employers, aliases, associates, physical descriptions, and other publicly available data, stitching it together into a single searchable profile that investigators can access.
How could InquiryIQ change police investigation timelines?
According to experts, InquiryIQ and similar tools could compress days or weeks of traditional detective work into minutes by instantly compiling comprehensive profiles on individuals. This speed advantage could help police solve crimes faster, but it also reduces the cost and effort required to conduct investigations on people who might not have been scrutinized otherwise.
What is Clearview AI's history with scraping data without consent?
Clearview AI built its business model on scraping 3 billion photos from the internet without consent, which formed the foundation of its facial recognition service used by police departments. The company has already faced regulatory fines across Europe for this practice, and InquiryIQ suggests they intend to apply the same scraping model to other types of personal digital information.
What are the privacy concerns raised by InquiryIQ's capabilities?
InquiryIQ raises significant privacy concerns because it enables the automated aggregation of a person's entire digital footprint—including social posts, addresses, and associate networks—without their knowledge or consent. The tool lowers barriers for conducting broad investigative searches, making it practical for police to scrutinize individuals they might never have investigated under traditional methods, potentially leading to increased surveillance of innocent people.
Further Reading
- Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police, it tells the BBC - BBC News
- Clearview AI turned Facebook photos into a police search engine - Webiano Digital
- Clearview AI Now Used by Over 3000 Police Departments - CambridgeAnalytica.org
- The Use of Clearview AI to Support Warrants Violates the Fourth Amendment - Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal
- Flock says its cameras make US safer - so why are they ... - BBC News
