As war rages on Ukrainian lands, the state led by Volodymyr Zelensky has received help from Clearview AI
, the American facial recognition company, to "combat disinformation, identify Russian agents and the dead".
Voices are raised against this aid which could be used for other objectives than those publicly communicated by the management of the start-up.
The English news agency Reuters revealed yesterday that the controversial American company Clearview AI had offered its facial recognition services free of charge to Ukraine to help the state deal with the Russian invasion. According to the company's CEO, Hoan Ton-That, contacted by Reuters, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense began training in the use of the software this weekend. The stated objectives are clear: to facilitate the identification of the dead, identify Russian agents and combat false information.
Russian, Russian agents operating in the territory.
A dangerous lack of control
The identification of the Russian agents raises questions from experts and observers, given the setbacks of Clearview AI in the field of police surveillance in the United States. Risk 0 does not exist and the reliability of the tool still needs to be improved, which could cause false positives, potentially leading to unfair fights or arrests.
“We are going to see technology with good intentions backfire and hurt the very people it is meant to protect. Once you have brought these systems and their associated databases into a war zone, you have no control over how they will be used,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the agency, told Reuters. American organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). He claims that using it to identify the dead is the least dangerous way to operate this kind of technology, and therefore potentially the only valid one.
Remember that Clearview AI is the subject of several international investigations
