Scandalous Clearview AI will digitize Ukrainians: the Ministry of Digital Development has already agreed on cooperation

According to the ministry’s telegram channel, leading experts from the Ministry of Digital Development met with Hoan Ton-That, managing director of Clearview AI. The parties agreed to build Ukraine’s digital infrastructure based on the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence.

During the talks, the possibility of opening a Clearview AI office in Ukraine was actively discussed, which will attract domestic talents in the field of IT and artificial intelligence to new digitalization projects in Ukraine.

What is known about Clearview AI

It is an American facial recognition company that provides its software to law enforcement. The company’s algorithm matches faces against a database of more than 20 billion images indexed from the internet, including social media.

The company was founded by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz and kept its activities secret for a long time until it became aware of its collaboration with law enforcement in late 2019.

Clearview AI sells access to its database to law enforcement and has 3,100 active users, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Department of Homeland Security.

Also, after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Clearview AI began to actively help our country by providing its software and databases to detect war criminals, identify occupiers’ bodies and monitor checkpoints.

Clearview AI scandals

Contrary to Clearview AI’s claims that its service is only sold to law enforcement, a data breach that occurred in early 2020 revealed that there are multiple business entities on Clearview’s client list. For example, the list includes mobile operators, gyms, credit unions, and even the Chicago Cubs baseball team.

Since the company also uses photos from social networks, Twitter has demanded that Clearview AI remove all photos of its users in 2020. He wanted to do the same YouTube and Facebook.

Whether Clearview AI is meeting the demand of these IT giants is still unknown, as its CEO (and one of its founders) Hoan Thon-Bu refers to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which allows the collection of public photos.

However, in other countries the US Constitution does not apply, so in March 2022 Clearview AI was fined $20 million by the Italian data protection regulator for violating GDPR and asked to remove all Italian records from its database. Similar fines and takedown orders came in Australia, France and the United Kingdom.

Criticism from human rights activists

Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have criticized the UAF’s use of Clearview AI products. Human rights activists recognize that the use of such software in wartime is justified, but still carries the risk of violating the rights of a person, even a deceased person.

These risks, according to human rights activists, lie in the fact that despite all of Clearview AI’s assurances of recognition accuracy, there is no 100% guarantee that the system will not fail. Additionally, criminologists interviewed by human rights activists argue that the impact of dismemberment on the bodies of the destroyed occupiers does not contribute in any way to accurate identification as such.

According to human rights activists, relatives of Russian soldiers can see messages on websites and Telegram channels about the death of their relatives, who later turn out to be alive as the system did not correctly identify the face of the deceased. Human rights activists say this creates “psychological trauma” in relatives. From a moral standpoint, they say, freeing the identities of the dead online is a violation of the rights of both the living and the dead.

Previously Focus Clearview said the AI ​​developers acknowledged that the recognition system could make mistakes during wartime that cost people their lives.