Ukraine has started using Clearview AI face recognition

Ukraine’s defense ministry began using Clearview AI facial recognition technology on Saturday, the company’s chief executive told Reuters. The American startup offered to expose the Russian attackers, fight the misinformation and identify the dead.

Ukraine gets free access to Clearview AI’s powerful face search engine. The technology will allow authorities to control people at checkpoints – including Lee Wolosky, a Clearview adviser and former diplomat under US Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Plans began to emerge after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That sent a letter to Kyiv offering assistance, according to a copy seen by Reuters.

Clearview said it had not offered the technology to Russia, which calls its actions in Ukraine a “special operation.”

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine declined to comment.

Earlier, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation said it was considering bids from US-based artificial intelligence companies such as Clearview. Many Western companies have pledged to help Ukraine by providing internet material, cybersecurity tools and other support.

The founder of Clearview said that his start-up has more than 2 billion images from the Russian social networking service VKontakte, from a database of more than 10 billion photos in total.

This database can help Ukraine identify the dead more easily than trying to identify fingerprints and it works even if there is a deformity on the face. Research by the US Department of Energy found that decomposition reduces the efficiency of technology, while a document from a 2021 conference showed promising results.

The Ton-That letter also states that Clearview technology could be used to reunite refugees separated from their families, identify Russian agents and help the government refute false social media posts. with the war.

The exact purpose for which the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is using the technology is unclear, Ton-That said. Other parts of the Ukrainian government are expected to use Clearview technology in the coming days, he and Wolosky said.

VKontakte images make the Clearview dataset more complete than that of PimEyes, a publicly available image search engine that humans have used to identify people in war images, Wolosky said. VKontakte did not immediately respond to a request for comment – the American social networking company Facebook, which has been renamed Meta Platforms Inc, had demanded that Clearview stop taking its data.

Critics argue that face recognition could misidentify people at checkpoints and in battle. A mismatch could lead to civilian deaths, just as unjust arrests have resulted from police use, said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York.

“We will see well-intentioned technology boomeranging and hurting the very people it’s supposed to help,” he said.

Ton-That stated that Clearview technology should never be used as the sole source of identification and that he would not want the technology to be used in breach of the Geneva Conventions.

Clearview, which sells mainly to US law enforcement, is fighting lawsuits in the United States accusing it of violating privacy by taking pictures online. Clearview claims that its data collection is similar to how Google Search works. However, several countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, have found its practices illegal.

Cahn described the identification of the dead as the least dangerous way to develop technology in war, but said that “once you put these systems and related databases into a war zone, you have no control over how they will be used”.

euractiv.gr

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