Ukraine is reportedly using facial recognition software to help identify the Russian soldiers that were killed in combat. The Ukrainian government wants to track down their families to inform them about the demise of the soldiers.

Ukraine Uses Facial Recognition on Killed Soldiers

Ukraine's vice-prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, told Reuters that the country had been using software the controversial facial recognition provider Clearview AI to find the social media accounts of the dead Russian soldiers.

Fedorov said that as a courtesy to the mothers of the dead Russian soldiers, they are disseminating the information over social media to let at least the families know that they have lost their sons and to give them the chance to come and collect their bodies.

Earlier this month, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense started using technology from Clearview AI, which scrapes images on the web to match with the faces featured in the uploaded photos.

Also Read: American Civil Liberties Union Sues Clearview AI for Violating Privacy

Reuters first reported Ukraine's use of Clearview AI earlier this month, but it was not clear how the facial recognition technology was being used.

Clearview AI offered its service to Ukraine for free after the Russian invasion. The tech company also said that its search engine includes more than 2 billion images from VKontakte, a Russian social media site, according to Business Insider.

Clearview AI's Controversy

The New York-based software company sparked a backlash over its privacy practices from users and authorities around the world.

Earlier this month, Italy fined Clearview AI $22 million for violating the EU consumer privacy laws and ordered the software company to delete all its data on Italian residents.

Also, the UK Information Commissioner Office and the French authorities demanded that Clearview AI stop processing all user data.

The software company is also in the middle of a lawsuit in Chicago after consumers filed a case in the US federal court under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit concerns whether the company's collection of photos from the web violated the privacy law.

Clearview AI has said that all of its actions are legal and that its face matches should only be a starting point in investigations.

Several reports have also questioned the reliability of the company's facial recognition technology. Studies have shown that facial recognition software usually fails to identify minorities and can present biases in policing.

Richard Bassed from the forensic medicine department at Monash University in Australia said that facial recognition could be unreliable when it is used to identify the dead. The most common ways to confirm someone's identity after passing are their fingerprints, dental records, and DNA.

Obtaining samples of such data pre-death can be challenging, so Ukraine has turned to innovative techniques such as facial recognition, according to Forbes.

However, injured faces, clouded eyes, and expressionless faces can make facial recognition unusable on the dead, said Bassed.

Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said that if the technology is truly only used for identifying the dead, the biggest risk of misidentification and wrongfully telling people that their loved ones have died.

Related Article: Clearview AI Hit With Dozens of Lawsuit in Europe Over Method of Collecting Data

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Written by Sophie Webster