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in the following weeks Russia invaded Ukraine Hoan Ton-That, managing director of facial recognition company Clearview AI, started thinking about how to get involved.

He believed that his company’s technology could provide clarity in complex situations in war.

“I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming to be actors,” Ton-That said. “I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identity.”

In early March, he reached out to people who could help him contact the Ukrainian government. Attorney Lee Wolosky, a member of Clearview’s advisory board, Worked under the Biden administrationHe met with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.

Mr. Ton-That prepared a letter explaining that his app “can instantly identify someone from just one photo” and that police and federal agencies in the United States are using it to solve crimes. This feature brought the Clearview review on privacy concerns and related questions. racism and the other prejudices in artificial intelligence systems.

Mr. Ton-That wrote that the tool that can identify a suspect caught on security camera could be valuable to a country under attack. He said the tool could identify people who could be spies, as well as those who died, by comparing their faces to Clearview’s database of 20 billion faces on the public network, including “Russian social sites like VKontakte.”

As previously reported by Mr. Ton-That, he has decided to offer Clearview’s services to Ukraine for free. Reuters. Now, less than a month later, New York-based Clearview has created more than 200 accounts for users with over 5,000 searches across five Ukrainian government agencies. Clearview has also translated its app to Ukrainian.

“It was an honor to help Ukraine,” said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three institutions in Ukraine confirming their use of the tool. It confirmed the names on their official identities by identifying the dead soldiers and POWs, as well as travelers in the country. Fear of spies and saboteurs in the country, increasing paranoia.

According to an email, Ukrainian national police seized two photos of dead Russian soldiers reviewed by The New York Times on March 21. One dead man’s uniform had the identifying patch, but the other did not, so the ministry ran. your face through Clearview’s app

The app revealed photos of a 33-year-old similar-looking man from Ulyanovsk, wearing a paratrooper uniform and holding a gun, in profile photos on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social media site. An attempt was made to contact relatives in Russia to report the man’s death, but there was no response, according to an official from the national police.

Identifying the identities of the deceased soldiers and informing their families is part of this process. a campaignAccording to a Telegram post by Ukrainian deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, the Russian public cost of conflict and “to dispel the myth of the ‘special ops’ where ‘there are no soldiers’ and ‘no one dies’,” he wrote.

Images of conflict zones, civilians massacred, and soldiers left behind on city streets that have turned into battlefields have become more common and instantly accessible in the age of social media. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demonstrated graphic images of attacks To world leaders from his country while making his case for more international aid. But such images, beyond conveying an instinctive sense of war, can now offer something else: a chance for facial recognition technology to play an important role.

But critics warn that tech companies could take advantage of a crisis to expand with little privacy oversight, and any mistake made by the software or those who use it could have dire consequences in a war zone.

Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, opposes any use of facial recognition technology and said he believes it should be banned worldwide because it is used by governments. persecute minority groups and suppress the opposition. Russia and China, among others, have installed advanced facial recognition on cameras in cities.

“Battle zones are often used as testing grounds not only for weapons, but for surveillance tools that are then deployed on the civilian population or used for law enforcement or crowd control purposes,” Ms Greer said. “Companies like Clearview are keen to take advantage of the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine to normalize the use of their malware and invasive software.”

Clearview is facing several lawsuits in the United States, and people’s use of photos without their consent has been outlawed in Canada, England, France, Australia, and Italy. He faces fines in England and Italy.

Ms Greer added: “We already know that authoritarian states like Russia use facial recognition surveillance to suppress protests and opposition. Expanding the use of facial recognition doesn’t hurt authoritarians like Putin, it helps them.”

Facial recognition has advanced in power and accuracy in recent years and is becoming more accessible to the public.

While Clearview AI says it only makes its database available to law enforcement, other facial recognition services looking for matches on the web, including PimEyes and FindClone, are available to anyone willing to pay for them. PimEyes will display public photos on the internet. FindClone It searches for photos taken from the Russian social media site VKontakte.

Facial recognition vendors are picking sides in the conflict. Giorgi Gobronidze, a professor in Tbilisi, Georgia, who bought PimEyes in December, said after the invasion began, Russia banned the use of the site, citing concerns that it would be used to identify Ukrainians.

“No Russian customers are allowed to use the service anymore,” said Gobronidze. “We don’t want our service to be used for war crimes,” he said.

Groups such as the Dutch research site Bellingcat have used facial recognition sites for reports on the conflict and Russia’s military operations.

Bellingcat’s director of research, Aric Toler, said his preferred face search engine is FindClone. told three hours surveillance video What emerged this week from a courier service in Belarus shows men in military uniforms packing items such as TVs, car batteries and electric scooters for shipping.

Mr Toler said he allowed FindClone to identify several men as Russian soldiers who had sent “loot” from Ukraine to their homes.

Journalists like Mr. Toler sometimes play the role of arbiters for their audiences, as Ukraine and Russia wage an information war over what motivated the invasion and how it went.

Mr. Federov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, tweeted a frame from the same security camera footage of one of the soldiers at the courier service counter. Mr. Federov claimed that the man had been described as a “Russian special forces officer” who committed atrocities in Bucha and “returned all the stolen items to his family”.

“We will find every murderer,” Mr. Federov added.

The technology has potential beyond detecting losses or tracking specific units. Peter Singer, a security expert at New America, a Washington think tank, said growing data on people and their movements would make it easier to track down those responsible for war crimes. However, it can also make it difficult for civilians to remain silent in tense environments.

“Ukraine is the first major conflict where we have seen facial recognition technology used on this scale, but not the last,” said Mr Singer. “It will be more and more difficult for the warriors of the future to keep their identities secret, like ordinary civilians walking the streets of your own city.”

“In a world where more and more data is being collected, everyone leaves a trail of connectable points,” he added.

This trail is not just online. drone footage, satellite imagesPhotos and videos taken by people in Ukraine all play a role in understanding what’s going on there.

Mr. Toler of Bellingcat said the technology was not perfect. “It’s easy to misfire—it goes without saying,” he said. “But people are more right than wrong about this. They figured out how to verify identities.”

Faces may look similar, so secondary information in the form of an identifying mark, tattoo, or clothing is important for confirming a match. Whether this will be in a tense, wartime situation is an open question.

Mr. Toler isn’t sure how much longer he will have access to his preferred facial recognition tool. He said that because FindClone was based in Russia, it was subject to sanctions.

“I still have 30 days to run out of service, so I’m desperately trying to add more juice to my account,” said Mr. Toler. “I have a friend in Kyrgyzstan. I am trying to use his debit card to replenish my account.”