Jeffrey Dastin and Paresh David

(Reuters) – Ukraine’s defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology, the company’s chief executive told Reuters, after the U.S. startup offered to uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead.

Ukraine is receiving free access to Clearview AI’s powerful search engine for faces, letting authorities potentially vet people of interest at checkpoints, among other uses, added Lee Wolosky, an adviser to Clearview and former diplomat under U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

According to Reuters’s copy, Clearview Chief Executive Hoan Tan-That wrote a letter offering help to Kyiv after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Clearview claimed it hadn’t offered Russia the technology, calling its actions in Ukraine a special operation.

Requests for comments from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine were not answered. A spokesperson from Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation stated that it had been considering proposals from U.S.-based companies such as Clearview. Numerous Western companies have offered to support Ukraine by providing cybersecurity tools, internet hardware and other support.

Clearview founder John Clearview claimed that the startup has more than 2Billion images from Russian social media site VKontakte, which is a collection of 10Billion photos.

Ton-That stated that this database will help Ukraine locate the dead faster than matching fingerprints. Research for the U.S. Department of Energy found decomposition reduced the technology’s effectiveness while a paper from a 2021 conference showed promising results.

Ton-That also stated that Clearview technology could be used by the government to identify Russian operatives, reunite separated families and debunk fake social media posts about the conflict.

Ton-That did not specify the exact reason why Ukraine’s defense minister is using this technology. Wolosky also stated that Clearview is likely to be used by other sections of Ukraine’s government over the following days.

Wolosky stated that Clearview has a more complete dataset than PimEyes’, which is a public image search engine people use to find individuals in war photographs. VKontakte didn’t immediately reply to my request. However, the U.S. social media firm Facebook (NASDAQ) had asked Clearview not to take its data.

A critic suggests that facial recognition may misidentify soldiers and civilians at combat checkpoints. Unfair arrests and civilian deaths could be the result of a mismatch, according to Albert Fox Cahn who is executive director at New York’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

“We’re going to see well-intentioned technology backfiring and harming the very people it’s supposed to help,” he said.

Ton-That said Clearview should not be used solely for identification. He also stated that Clearview would never allow the technology to violate the Geneva Conventions which established standards for humanitarian aid during war.

He said that users in Ukraine receive training, and they must input the case number and reason of a search prior to queries.

Clearview sells primarily to U.S. police officers. Clearview has faced lawsuits from the United States alleging it violated privacy rights by stealing images from the Internet. Clearview says its data collection is identical to Google’s (NASDAQ:) method of searching. Many countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom have declared its methods illegal.

Cahn described identifying the deceased as probably the least dangerous way to deploy the technology in war, but he said that “once you introduce these systems and the associated databases to a war zone, you have no control over how it will be used and misused.”