- James Clayton
- BBC News Technology reporter
April 14, 2022
Credit, Getty Images
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The Ukrainian government’s use of Clearview has raised questions about whether this powerful tool can be used in a war.
Last month, a controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, announced that it had turned over its technology to the Ukrainian government.
The BBC had access to evidence of how it is used in over 1,000 cases to identify people, living or dead.
This article contains graphic descriptions that may disturb some readers.
A man lies motionless on the ground, his head bowed. His body is bare except for his Calvin Klein boxer shorts. His eyes are surrounded by bruises.
The body was found in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. The BBC has seen photos of the man’s remains but we do not know the circumstances of his death.
There is clear evidence of head trauma. The man also had a tattoo on his left shoulder.
Unaware of who the victim was, Ukrainian authorities turned to cuttingedge technology: artificial intelligencepowered facial recognition.
Clearview AI’s facial recognition system is the best known and most controversial in the world.
The company has collected billions of photos from social media, from sites like Facebook and Twitter, to create a massive database. Its president and founder, Hoan TonThat, calls it a “face search engine.”
“It works like Google. But instead of typing words, the user inserts an image of a face into the search box,” explains TonThat.
The company faced several legal challenges. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter have all sent notices to Clearview asking them to stop using images from its websites. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office even fined the company for not informing users about the collection of their personal photos.
In Ukraine
The Ukrainian government’s use of Clearview has raised questions about the implications of bringing this powerful tool to war.
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Hoan TonThat is the founder of Clearview AI
Clearview is used extensively, albeit controversially, by US government agencies. According to TonThat, 3,200 government agencies have purchased or tried the technology.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the company founder saw another application of his technology.
“We saw images of prisoners of war and people fleeing and thought our technology might be useful for identifying and verifying people,” he says.
TonThat made its search engine available to the Ukrainian government and the offer was accepted.
Back in Kharkiv, the authorities took a picture of the dead man’s face: head held high and eyes sunken toward the camera. They then checked the image against the Clearview database. The search turned up several photos of someone who closely resembled the dead man.
A photo had been taken on what appeared to be a hot day. The man was shirtless and had a tattoo on his left shoulder, just like the body. The search was successful and the authorities found out the name of the dead man.
Using facial recognition to identify the dead is nothing new, and Clearview is not the only platform used for this purpose in Ukraine.
“We’ve used this material for years,” says Aric Toler, chief investigator at Bellingcat, an organization specializing in investigative journalism.
In 2019, Bellingcat used facial recognition technology to identify a Russian who filmed the torture and murder of a prisoner in Syria.
The war in Ukraine is not the first time facial recognition technology has been used in a conflict.
But in Ukraine its use was more widespread than in any previous conflict.
Toler told the BBC he uses the FindClone facial recognition platform in Russia, which is particularly useful in identifying dead Russian soldiers.
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“It is important that the Ukrainian armed forces recognize that this is not a 100% accurate method of determining whether someone is your friend or foe,” warns Conor Healy.
Like Clearview, FindClone combines images from the publicly available internet, including Russian social media sites. You can even find people who don’t have accounts on these sites.
“They may not have a social media profile, but their wives or girlfriends do. Or maybe they live in a small town with a big military base and have a lot of friends in their unit with accounts,” explains Toler.
This last point is crucial to understanding the power of facial recognition technology.
In this way, a person can also be found who has never had a social media profile. If it appears in a photo sent by a friend or just in the background of a random image on the web, it’s already in the database.
Even military or security personnel with little online presence can be tracked.
a matter of accuracy
Critics of facial recognition point out that the technology is not infallible and mistakes can be devastating in times of war.
Clearview is not only used to identify bodies in Ukraine. The company also confirmed that it is used by the Ukrainian government at checkpoints to identify suspected enemies.
Clearview showed the BBC an email from a Ukrainian agency confirming the system is being used to identify living people.
“This system gave us the ability to quickly confirm the accuracy of data on suspects in detention,” the Ukrainian official, who declined to be named, said in an email.
“Over a thousand queries were performed for proper verification and identification while using Clearview,” the email reads.
That worries some analysts.
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Even if a person has never had a social media profile, they can still be found by tools like Clearview.
Conor Healy is a facial recognition expert at IPVM, an organization that oversees security technology.
“It’s important for the Ukrainian armed forces to realize that this is not a 100 percent accurate way of determining if someone is your friend or foe,” Healy says.
“This can’t be a technology that’s a matter of life and death, where you can get through or not, where you can be arrested or, heaven forbid, even killed. That’s not how it should be used.”
Other analysts are issuing even stronger warnings. Albert Fox Cahn of the surveillance group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project speaks of “an impending human rights catastrophe”.
“In peacetime, when mistakes are made in facial recognition, people are wrongly arrested. If mistakes are made with this technology in a war zone, innocent people will be killed,” Fox Cahn told Forbes magazine.
The BBC contacted the Ukrainian government to discuss using Clearview, but received no response.
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Clearview has not received consent from social media companies or anyone else to collect personal images
TonThat defends his company’s technology, saying it has a proven accuracy of over 99%.
However, this accuracy is highly dependent on the quality of the image, the position of the head, or whether the face is covered with a mask, for example.
There’s also the issue of privacy, which has been problematic for Clearview in the US and Europe. The company sources publicly available images from Facebook and Instagram to build its database.
But the company has never received the consent of the social media companies or anyone else to collect these images. You reading this article are almost certainly in the database, although you probably haven’t given Clearview permission to use your image.
Last year, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office fined Clearview for failing to tell people it was collecting their personal photos on social media platforms.
TonThat accepts that the legality of facial recognition technology is still debated but believes Clearview is acting within the law and says the technology is “misinterpreted”.
However, facial recognition technology clearly has dystopian applications. In November last year, the BBC reported that China was planning to use facial recognition technology against journalists.
According to TonThat, Clearview would not allow such searches. He also guarantees that his company does not work with authoritarian governments and would not work with Russia.
However, Clearview’s technology can be used in a military context.
For example, last year the company signed a deal with the Pentagon to explore the possibility of incorporating its technology into augmented reality glasses.
And Clearview is just one of several companies with military contracts to develop artificial intelligence for facial recognition.
Privacy advocates have another concern. Facial recognition technology could be useful to Ukrainian authorities in times of war. But will they return the technology to Clearview in peacetime?
“There are many examples of technologies that are introduced in wartime and endure in peacetime,” says Healy.
“I hope that’s not the approach they’re taking.”
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