Face recognition goes to war
On 12 March 2022, according to Clearview AI's chief executive Hoan Ton-That, Ukraine's defence ministry began using the company's face search engine free of charge. By 24 March Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, confirmed to Reuters that Ukraine was using it to find the social media accounts of dead Russian soldiers and inform their families.
Why it matters
A face recognition system that several countries had already ruled unlawful was openly used by a state at war: to identify the dead and, according to the digital ministry in April, to identify people suspected of war crimes. The record belongs to defence and to harm alike: critics named misidentification as the main risk from the start.
Clearview, its founder said, held over 10 billion photos, more than 2 billion of them from the Russian network VKontakte; that is the company's own description. On 13 March the company called the ministry's exact purpose unclear. Fedorov gave no number of identifications and said only that the share of bodies claimed by families was high; Reuters and the Guardian could not verify it. By his account Ukraine was not using it to identify its own dead. A digital ministry page of 9 April 2022 says face recognition helped identify looters and killers in the Kyiv region, but does not name the supplier. What the record does not claim: that the system was used to vet people at checkpoints, which was only a possibility named by a company adviser, or any measure of accuracy.