Still, several countries including the United Kingdom and Australia have deemed its practices illegal.Ĭahn described identifying the deceased as probably the least dangerous way to deploy the technology in war, but he said that 'once you introduce these systems and the associated databases to a war zone, you have no control over how it will be used and misused.Facial recognition technology is being used in warfare for the first time. Clearview contends its data gathering is similar to how Google search works.

law enforcement, is fighting lawsuits in the United States accusing it of violating privacy rights by taking images from the web. Like other users, those in Ukraine are receiving training and have to input a case number and reason for a search before queries, he said.Ĭlearview, which primarily sells to U.S. Ton-That said Clearview should never be wielded as the sole source of identification and that he would not want the technology to be used in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which created legal standards for humanitarian treatment during war. 'We're going to see well-intentioned technology backfiring and harming the very people it's supposed to help,' he said. A mismatch could lead to civilian deaths, just like unfair arrests have arisen from police use, said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York. social media company Facebook, now Meta, had demanded Clearview stop taking its data.Īt least one critic says facial recognition could misidentify people at checkpoints and in battle. VKontakte did not immediately respond to a request for comment U.S. The VKontakte images make Clearview's dataset more comprehensive than that of PimEyes, a publicly available image search engine that people have used to identify individuals in war photos, Wolosky said. Other parts of Ukraine's government are expected to deploy Clearview in the coming days, he and Wolosky said. The exact purpose for which Ukraine's defense ministry is using the technology is unclear, Ton-That said. Ton-That's letter also said Clearview's technology could be used to reunite refugees separated from their families, identify Russian operatives and help the government debunk false social media posts related to the war. Department of Energy found decomposition reduced the technology's effectiveness while a paper from a 2021 conference showed promising results. That database can help Ukraine identify the dead more easily than trying to match fingerprints and works even if there is facial damage, Ton-That wrote. The Clearview founder said his startup had more than 2 billion images from the Russian social media service VKontakte at its disposal, out of a database of over 10 billion photos total. Many Western businesses have pledged to help Ukraine, providing internet hardware, cybersecurity tools and other support.

Previously, a spokesperson for Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation said it was considering offers from U.S.-based artificial intelligence companies like Clearview. Ukraine's Ministry of Defense did not reply to requests for comment.

The plans started forming after Russia invaded Ukraine and Clearview Chief Executive Hoan Ton-That sent a letter to Kyiv offering assistance, according to a copy seen by Reuters.Ĭlearview said it had not offered the technology to Russia, which calls its actions in Ukraine a 'special operation.' Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit

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