As the month-long Russia-Ukraine war continues and casualties increase on both sides, Ukraine is deploying facial recognition software to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers deceased in combat and inform their families of their deaths, Ukraine’s vice prime minister told Reuters in an exclusive interview.
The country has started using Clearview AI, a New York-based facial recognition provider. This software matches uploaded photos with similar images available on the web. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice prime minister who handles the Ministry of Digital Transformation said that based on the search query results from Clearview, the ministry is searching for social media accounts of the dead Russian soldiers. The country is then reaching out to the relatives to inform them and requesting them to make arrangements for collecting bodies.
Clearview, which offered its service free of charge to Ukraine after the Russian invasion, has said its search engine includes over 2 billion images from VKontakte, a popular Russian social media service.
While it is uncertain when Ukraine started using the software or how many bodies have been identified with this approach, Fedorov said the percentage of correctly identified individuals is high.
“As a courtesy to the mothers of those soldiers, we are disseminating this information over social media to at least let families know that they’ve lost their sons and to then enable them to come to collect their bodies,” Fedorov said in an interview, speaking via a translator.
While the Russians are unable to confirm Ukraine’s use of Clearview, Reuters was also unable to independently confirm this news. The Ukrainians have also started an online form initiative where relatives of Russian soldiers can submit claims to collect the bodies of their deceased soldiers.
Forensic experts argue that clouded eyes and injured and expressionless faces could hamper facial recognition reliability which can do more harm than good it intends. For the same reasons, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System of the US is yet to adopt automated facial recognition.
Several factions of the society including civil rights groups and other security-focused groups have also decried Ukraine’s adoption of Clearview because it can misidentify people due to other reasons, leading to further complexities and also because of the ambiguity of violating privacy laws.
Clearview is already battling a lawsuit in U.S. federal court in Chicago for an accusation of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Source: indianext.co.in
