Tough questions arise as face recognition tech joins the war.
Author: Editorial Crew | Image: Clearview AI
This month, Ukrainian security services began using an emerging technology built by Clearview, which retrieves images and web pages to match the faces displayed in the uploaded photo. Reuters first described Ukraine's use of the Clearview technology earlier this month, but it is unclear how the technology will be used in the future.
Ukraine's vice president and head of the digital transformation department told Reuters that his country was using the Clearview AI face recognition software to find social media accounts of dead Russian soldiers. They are using the permission of the families of these soldiers to place the information on social media, enable their recognizance and allow them to come and collect their bodies. The company is offering its services free of charge to the Ukrainian government after the Russian invasion and revealed its search included more than 2 billion images from VKontakte, Russia's most popular social media service.
Clearview AI, a New York-based software company, has already drawn some criticism of its privacy practices from users and officials worldwide. Recently, Italy fined the company 20 million for a breach of EU customer privacy policy and ordered the company to delete data relative to the Italian residents.
The company is also working hard on a lawsuit in the US federal court in Chicago against consumers under Illinois biometric privacy law. The current issue concerns whether online video collection of companies violates privacy laws. Clearview said its actions are legal, and its face-off should be just the beginning of an investigation. Many reports have also raised questions about the reliability of the technology. Research has shown that face masks do not detect black and brown faces and can lead to insults in law enforcement. Clearview dismisses these claims.
Richard Bassed, chief of the Department of Pharmacology at Monash University in Australia, said facial expressions could be unreliable if used to identify dead bodies and fingerprints; Dental records and DNA continue to be the most commonly used means of supporting human identity. However, obtaining pre-death samples from this data from strong adversaries paves the way for faster new systems that could provide such face recognition.
Ukraine's vice president declined to comment on the number of bodies found by facial expressions, but said that the percentage of prominent family members claimed to be high and that Ukraine would not use technology to identify its troops killed in action. Clearview AI has no guarantee against the misuse of the technology, whether it scans people at checkpoints, interviews, or even targeted killings. In a recent company statement, Clearview said that everyone who has access to a trained tool knows how to use it safely and that the current technology retains an accuracy of 99.85%.
A Kremlin spokesman told Reuters that Moscow did not know about Ukraine's use of Clearview software and continued to report data stating that 498 soldiers had been killed in what is still described as military operations, against the clear evidence of conducting multiple war crimes against civilians.
