A system that searches a database of billions of facial images could help Ukraine uncover Russian infiltrators, combat disinformation and identify the dead, a company said.
Facial recognition firm Clearview AI has offered its services to the Ukrainian government.
The company says it has a searchable database of 10 billion faces pulled from the web.
But the technology has previously attracted fines from data regulators.
“I am pleased to confirm that Clearview AI has provided its innovative facial recognition technology to Ukrainian officials for use during the crisis they are facing,” chief executive Hoan Ton-That told the BBC in a statement.
Clearview AI offered its services for free in a letter to the Ukrainian government, first reported by Reuters, which the BBC has seen.
It says that a large part of its database of faces comes from Russian social networking sites.
The letter claims that the company has more than two billion images from Vkontakte (VK), a social network sometimes referred to as “Russian Facebook.”
The breadth of its Russian coverage makes it more comprehensive than PimEyes, a publicly available rival technology, which has previously been used to identify people in war photographs, a Clearview AI adviser said.
In the letter, Mr. Ton-That identifies a number of potential scenarios where the technology could be useful, including:
- identify infiltrators by matching a photo of them or their ID card
- identify the dead without the need for fingerprints
- fighting disinformation
- family reunification identifying people without paperwork
Ton-That said Ukraine started using the technology on Saturday.
The country’s defense ministry has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment.
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Clearview AI’s technology has been criticized by privacy watchdogs.
In November, the UK data privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) imposed a provisional £17m fine on the company.
He was also fined €20m (£16.8m) by Italian regulators recently, after they discovered he applied “what amounted to biometric monitoring techniques” to people in the country.
And while its technology is used by US law enforcement, the company faces lawsuits in the United States over its use of images collected from the Internet.
At least one critic said there was a risk that facial recognition could misidentify people at checkpoints.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project in New York, told Reuters it was possible “we’re going to see well-intentioned technology failing and harming the very people it’s supposed to help.”
Mr. Ton-That added that Clearview AI should never be used as the sole source of identification.
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