By Obinna Ezenwa
Facial recognition technology to search a database of billions of facial images has become vital, as it could help Ukraine expose Russian infiltrators, fight misinformation and identify the dead, a facial recognition company, Firm Clearview AI has revealed.
Firm Clearview AI has offered its face recognition technology to Ukraine’s Government. The company said it has a searchable database of 10 billion faces sourced from the web. It also noted that the technology has previously attracted fines from data regulators.
“I’m pleased to confirm that Clearview AI has provided its groundbreaking facial recognition technology to Ukrainian officials for their use during the crisis they are facing,” Chief Executive Hoan Ton- disclosed in a statement.
Russian Faces
In a letter to Ukraine’s Government, it was stated that the Clearview AI offered its services for free as firstly reported by Reuters.
Clearview AI added that a large portion of its database of faces is drawn from Russian social media sites.
The letter claimed that the company has more than two billion images from the Vkontakte (VK), a social network sometimes dubbed the “Facebook of Russia”.
The breadth of its Russian coverage makes it more comprehensive than a publicly available rival technology PimEyes, which has previously been used to identify people in war photos, a Clearview AI adviser said.
In the letter, Mr Ton- identifies a number of potential scenarios in which the technology could be useful including:
Identifying infiltrators by matching a photo of them or their ID card; Identifying the dead without the need for fingerprints; Fighting misinformation.
Clearview AI’s technology has been criticized by privacy watchdogs.
In November, the UK’s data privacy regulator, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) issued the company with a provisional £17m fine.
It was also fined 20m euros (£16.8m) by Italian regulators recently, after finding it applied “what amounted to biometric monitoring techniques” to individuals in the country.
While its technology is used by US law enforcement, the company currently faces lawsuits in America over its use of images gathered from the internet.
A critic said there was a risk facial recognition could misidentify people at checkpoints.
