Surveillance Spy

Honovich is on Time’s new list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI,” thanks to his work at Internet Protocol Video Market (IPVM), a publication he founded in 2008. 

According to Time:

Working in product management for facial-recognition companies for five years in Silicon Valley during the mid-2000s, John Honovich noticed how surveillance companies often misrepresented or exaggerated claims to consumers, on subjects including their ability to capture high-quality and unbiased information. That led him to found a niche trade publication in 2008 called the Internet Protocol Video Market (IPVM), which aimed to provide reliable reporting on the limits of security technology.

Some 15 years later, IPVM has gone from being an industry-focused outlet read mostly by security technicians to a leading source of information on the harms of facial-recognition technology—and, in turn, influencing U.S. policy.

In 2022, The Atlantic profiled Honovich after IVPM identified Chinese government efforts to use artificial intelligence to persecute Uyghurs. And in April 2023, Wired published a similar story about Honovich and IVPM: “A Tiny Blog Took on Big Surveillance in China—and Won.”