net.wars

If there is one thing the Western world has near-universally agreed in the last month, it's that in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainians are the injured party. The good guys.

If there's one thing that privacy advocates and much of the public agree on, it's that Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of (it claims) 10 billion facial images by scraping publicly accessible social media without the subjects' consent and sells access to it to myriad law enforcement organizations, is one of the world's creepiest companies. This assessment is exacerbated by the fact that the company and its CEO refuse to see anything wrong about their unconsented repurposing of other people's photos; it's out there for the scraping, innit?

Last week, Reuters reported that Clearview AI was offering Ukraine free access to its technology. Clearview's suggested uses: vetting people at checkpoints; debunking misinformation on social media; reuniting separated family members; and identifying the dead. Clearview's CEO, Hoan Ton-That, told Reuters that the company has 2 billion images of Russians scraped from Russian Facebook clone Vkonakte.

This week, it's widely reported that Ukraine is accepting the offer. At Forbes, Tom Brewster reports that Ukraine is using the technology to identify the dead.

Clearview AI has been controversial ever since January 2020, when Kashmir Hill reported its existence in the New York Times, calling it "the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it". Social media sites LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube all promptly sent cease-and-desist notices. A month later, Kim Lyons reported at The Verge that its 2,200 customers included the FBI, Interpol, the US Department of Justice, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a UAE sovereign wealth fund, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and college campus police departments.

In May 2021, Privacy International filed complaints in five countries. In response, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, and Italy have all found Clearview to be in breach of data protection laws and ordered it to delete all the photos of people that it has collected in their territories. Sweden, Belgium, and Canada have declared law enforcement use of Clearview's technology to be illegal.

Ukraine is its first known use in a war zone. In a scathing blog posting, Privacy International says, "...the use of Clearview's database by authorities is a considerable expansion of the realm of surveillance, with very real potential for abuse."

Brewster cites critics, who lay out familiar privacy issues. Misidentification in a war zone could lead to death if a live soldier's nationality is wrongly assessed (especially common when the person is non-white) and unnecessary heartbreak for dead soldiers' families. Facial recognition can't distinguish civilians and combatants. In addition, the use of facial recognition by the "good guys" in a war zone might legitimize the technology. This last seems to me unlikely; we all distinguish the difference between what's acceptable in peace time versus an extreme context. This issue here is *company*, not the technology, as PI accurately pinpoints: "...it seems no human tragedy is off-limits to surveillance companies looking to sanitize their image."

Jack McDonald, a senior lecturer in war studies at Kings College London who researches the relationship between ethics, law, technology, and war, sees the situation differently.

Some of the fears Brewster cites, for example, are far-fetched. "They're probably not going to be executing people at checkpoints." If facial recognition finds a match in those situations, they'll more likely make an arrest and do a search. "If that helps them to do this, there's a very good case for it, because Russia does appear to be flooding the country with saboteurs." Cases of misidentification will be important, he agrees, but consider the scale of harm in the conflict itself.

McDonald notes, however, that the use of biometrics to identify refugees is an entirely different matter and poses huge problems. "They're two different contexts, even though they're happening in the same space."

That leaves the use Ukraine appears to be most interested in: identifying dead bodies. This, McDonald explains, represents a profound change from the established norms, which include social and institutional structures and has typically been closely guarded. Even though the standard of certainty is much lower, facial recognition offers the possibility of being able to do identification at scale. In both cases, the people making the identification typically have to rely on photographs taken elsewhere in other contexts, along with dental records and, if all else fails, public postings.

The reality of social media is already changing the norms. In this first month of the war, Twitter users posting pictures of captured Russian soldiers are typically reminded that it is technically against the Geneva Convention to do so. The extensive documentation - video clips, images, first-person reports - that is being posted from the conflict zones on services like TikTok and Twitter is a second front in its own right. In the information war, using facial recognition to identify the dead is strategic.

This is particularly true because of censorship in Russia, where independent media have almost entirely shut down and citizens have only very limited access to foreign news. Dead bodies are among the only incontrovertible sources of information that can break through the official denials. The risk that inaccurate identification could fuel Russian propaganda remains, however.

Clearview remains an awful idea. But if I thought it would help save my country from being destroyed, would I care?

Illustrations: War damage in Mariupol, Ukraine (Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, via Wikimedia.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.