Kashmir Hill at the New York Times: “In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and images of the devastation wrought there flooded the news, Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of the facial recognition company Clearview AI, began thinking about how he could get involved.
He believed his company’s technology could offer clarity in complex situations in the war.
“I remember seeing videos of captured Russian soldiers and Russia claiming they were actors,” Mr. Ton-That said. “I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities.”
In early March, he reached out to people who might help him contact the Ukrainian government. One of Clearview’s advisory board members, Lee Wolosky, a lawyer who has worked for the Biden administration, was meeting with Ukrainian officials and offered to deliver a message.
Mr. Ton-That drafted a letter explaining that his app “can instantly identify someone just from a photo” and that the police and federal agencies in the United States used it to solve crimes. That feature has brought Clearview scrutiny over concerns about privacy and questions about racism and other biases within artificial-intelligence systems.
The tool, which can identify a suspect caught on surveillance video, could be valuable to a country under attack, Mr. Ton-That wrote. He said the tool could identify people who might be spies, as well as deceased people, by comparing their faces against Clearview’s database of 20 billion faces from the public web, including from “Russian social sites such as VKontakte.”
Mr. Ton-That decided to offer Clearview’s services to Ukraine for free, as reported earlier by Reuters. Now, less than a month later, the New York-based Clearview has created more than 200 accounts for users at five Ukrainian government agencies, which have conducted more than 5,000 searches. Clearview has also translated its app into Ukrainian.
“It’s been an honor to help Ukraine,” said Mr. Ton-That, who provided emails from officials from three agencies in Ukraine, confirming that they had used the tool. It has identified dead soldiers and prisoners of war, as well as travelers in the country, confirming the names on their official IDs. The fear of spies and saboteurs in the country has led to heightened paranoia.
According to one email, Ukraine’s national police obtained two photos of dead Russian soldiers, which have been viewed by The New York Times, on March 21. One dead man had identifying patches on his uniform, but the other did not, so the ministry ran his face through Clearview’s app…(More)”.