Last month, a controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, announced that it had handed over its technology to the Ukrainian government.
The BBC had access to evidence of how it is being used in more than a thousand cases to identify people living or dead.
This story contains graphic descriptions that may disturb some readers.
A man lies motionless on the ground, with his head bowed down. His body is nude except for a pair of Calvin Klein boxers. His eyes are surrounded by what appear to be bruises.
The body was found in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine. The BBC saw photographs of the remains but does not know the circumstances of death.
There is clear evidence of head trauma. The man also had a tattoo on his left shoulder.
Ukrainian authorities did not know who the victim was, so they decided to resort to an avant-garde method: recognition using artificial intelligence.
The Clearview AI company’s facial recognition system is the most famous and controversial in the world.
The company has collected billions of photos from social networks, from sites like Facebook and Twitter, to create a huge database of what its president and founder, Hoan Ton -That, called “a face search engine”.
“It works like Google. But instead of putting in a series of strings of words or text, the user puts in a photo of a face”, explains Ton-That.
The company has faced several legal challenges. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter have sent notifications to Clearview asking them to stop using images from their sites. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office even fined the company for not informing users about the collection of their personal photos.
En Ukraine
The use of Clearview by the Ukrainian government has raised questions about the implications of incorporating this powerful tool into a war.
Clearview is used widely, albeit controversially, by law enforcement in the United States. Ton-That says that 3,507 government agencies have purchased or tested the technology.
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine , the founder of the company saw another application for his controversial technology.
“We saw images of prisoners of war, of people fleeing, and we thought that our technology could be useful for identifying people and verification”, he says.
Ton-That made its search engine available to the government Ukrainian, and the offer was accepted.
Back in Kharkiv, the authorities took a photograph of the dead man’s face: with his head erect and the sunken eyes directed towards the camera.
Then they contrasted the image with the Clearview database. The search turned up several photos of someone who looked very similar to the deceased.
One photo had been taken on what appeared to be a hot day. The man was shirtless and had a tattoo on his left shoulder. The search was successful and the authorities already had a name.
Background
Using facial recognition to identify the dead is not new and Clearview is not the only platform used for this purpose in Ukraine.
“We have been using this material for years,” says Aric Toler, director of investigations at Bellingcat, an organization that specializes in investigative journalism.
In 2019, Bellingcat used facial recognition technology to help identify a Russian man who had filmed the torture and murder of a prisoner in Syria.
The Ukraine war is not the first in which facial recognition technology is used.
But its use there is broader than in any previous conflict. Toler told the BBC that he uses the facial recognition platform FindClone in Russia and says it has been particularly useful in identifying dead Russian soldiers.
Like Clearview, FindClone matches images from the publicly available internet, including Russian social media pages.
It is possible to find even people who do not have accounts on those sites.
“They may not have a profile on social networks, but their wives or girlfriends do. Or maybe they lived in a small town with a large military base and had a lot of friends in their unit who had accounts,” explains Toler.
This last point is essential to understand the power of facial recognition technology.
It means that even if a person has never had a profile on networks and thinks that she has deleted her image from the internet, she can still be found. By appearing in a photo uploaded by a friend or simply by being in the background of a random image on the internet, you are already in the database.
Even military or security personnel, that barely has an internet presence, can be tracked.
A matter of precision
Critics of facial recognition technology point out that it is not always correct, and that sometimes of war, mistakes can have potentially disastrous consequences.
Clearview is not only being used to identify dead bodies in Ukraine. The company also confirmed that it was being used by the Ukrainian government at checkpoints to help identify suspected enemies.
Clearview showed the BBC an email from a Ukrainian agency confirming that the system is being used to identify the living.
“This system gave us the opportunity to quickly confirm the accuracy of data on detained suspects,” says the email from a Ukrainian official who did not want to be identified.
“During the use of Clearview was made more than 1, search queries to perform proper verification and identification,” the email reads.
This is of concern to some analysts.
Conor Healy is a facial recognition expert at IPVM, an organization that monitors security technology. “It is important that Ukrainian forces recognize that this is not a way 99% accurate to determine if someone is your friend or your enemy“, says Healy. “It should not be a do-or-die technology where you pass or fail, where you could be jailed or, God forbid, even killed. This is not how this should be used at all.” Other analysts have issued even more warnings powerful. Albert Fox Cahn of the watchdog group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project speaks of “a human rights catastrophe in the making”. “When mistakes are made with facial recognition in peacetime, people are mistakenly arrested. When there are mistakes with this technology in a war zone, they kill innocent people“ Fox Cahn told Forbes magazine. The BBC contacted the Ukrainian government to discuss the use of Clearview, but received no response. Ton-That has defended the accuracy of his company’s technology, saying it has a proven accuracy of over 99%. However, a lot depends on the quality of the image, the position of the head or whether the face is covered, for example, with a mask. It is also the issue of privacy, which has been problematic for Clearview in the United States and in Eur opa. The company pulls publicly available images from companies like Facebook and Instagram to build its database. But he hasn’t asked the social media companies, or anyone else, if he could collect these images. If you are reading this article, you are almost certainly in the database, although you probably have not given Clearview permission to use your image. Last year, the Office of the Commissioner of Information from the UK fined Clearview for failing to inform people that it was collecting their personal photos on social media platforms. Ton-That accepts that the legality of the technology is still being debated of facial recognition, but believes that Clearview operates within the law and points out that the technology has been “misunderstood”. However, facial recognition technology clearly has dystopian applications. In November last year, the BBC reported that China planned to use facial recognition technology to take action against journalists. Ton-That says that Clearview would not allow this type of search. He also ensures that his company does not work with authoritarian governments and would not work with Russia. However, Clearview technology can be applied in a military context. Last year, for example, the company signed a contract 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 for the development of facial recognition artificial intelligence. Privacy advocates also express another concern. Facial recognition technology can be useful to the Ukrainian authorities in times of war. But will they just return the technology to Clearview in peacetime? “There is a big lots of examples of technologies being introduced in times of war and persisting in times of peace“, says Healy. “I hope that is not the approach they adopt”. James Clayton is a technology reporter for the BBC in North America and is based in San Francisco. He follows him on Twitter @jamesclayton5. Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss our best content. 
