Leonid Tymchenko spent the first month of Russia's invasion sitting in his dark government office after curfew. Unable to go home, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs scrolled through Telegram, looking at thousands of videos and images of advancing Russian soldiers. When Tymchenko was offered a chance to test a new facial-recognition tool, he uploaded some of the photos to try it out. He could not believe the results. Every time Tymchenko added a photo of a Russian soldier, the software, made by the American facial-recognition company Clearview AI, seemed to come back with an exact hit, linking to pages that revealed the soldier's name, hometown, and social-media profile.

Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software used by at least 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the US, has scrapped more than 30 billion images from social media platforms like Facebook. CEO Hoan Ton-That shared the statistic in a recent interview with BBC News (via Gizmodo) where he also said the company had run nearly 1 million searches for US police. Last March, Clearview disclosed its database featured more than 20 billion "publicly available" images, meaning the platform has grown by a staggering 50 percent over the past year. While Engadget cannot confirm those figures, they suggest the company, despite recent setbacks at the hands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and legal threats from platform holders, has found no shortage of interest for its services. In a rare admission, the Miami Police Department revealed it uses Clearview AI to investigate all manner of crimes, including everything from theft to murder.

Five days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a year ago this week, US-based facial recognition company Clearview AI offered the Ukrainian government free access to its technology, suggesting that it could be used to reunite families, identify Russian operatives, and fight misinformation. Soon afterward, the Ukraine government revealed it was using the technology to scan the faces of dead Russian soldiers to identify their bodies and notify their families. By December 2022, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, was tweeting a picture of himself with Clearview AI's CEO Hoan Ton-That, thanking the company for its support. Accounting for the dead and letting families know the fate of their relatives is a human rights imperative written into international treaties, protocols, and laws like the Geneva Conventions and the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) Guiding Principles for Dignified Management of the Dead. It is also tied to much deeper obligations.

A new presentation attack detection feature has been added to the Clearview Consent API from Clearview AI to allow developers to build spoof detection into identity verification solutions. Clearview Consent was launched just months ago to bring the company's facial recognition algorithms to a whole new set of use cases as a selfie biometrics tool, and the addition of presentation attack detection capabilities is the next step in its development, according to the people who made it. Clearview considered a range of approaches, and CEO Hoan Ton-That points out that developers do not typically have access to the specialized hardware behind device-based 3D biometric systems. Early engagement with Clearview Consent customers has yielded some insights into how businesses and developers plan to use it, which not only convinced the company to pursue liveness detection based on 2D images, but also imagine a range of applications. "We're looking at passive liveness video too, but some vendors have told us'We have these old profiles, and we want to find out how many of them are deepfakes and how many are presentation attacks," Clearview Ton-That tells Biometric Update in an interview.

More and more privacy watchdogs around the world are standing up to Clearview AI, a U.S. company that has collected billions of photos from the internet without people's permission. The company, which uses those photos for its facial recognition software, was fined £7.5 million ($9.4 million) by a U.K. regulator on May 26. The U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the firm, Clearview AI, had broken data protection law. The company denies breaking the law. But the case reveals how nations have struggled to regulate artificial intelligence across borders. Facial recognition tools require huge quantities of data.

Clearview AI, the surveillance firm notoriously known for harvesting some 20 billion face scans off of public social media searches, said it may bring its technology to schools and other private businesses. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, the company revealed it's working with a U.S. company selling visitor management systems to schools. That reveal came around the same time as a horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that tragically left 19 children and two teachers dead. Though Clearview wouldn't provide more details about the education-linked companies to Gizmodo, other facial recognition competitors have spent years trying to bring the tech to schools with varying levels of success and pushback. New York state even moved to ban facial recognition in schools two years ago.

In early March, Clearview A.I. founder, Hoan Ton-That, started reaching out to people who could help him present his technology to the Ukrainian government. Clearview holds a huge database of scraped photos from multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The facial recognition company is already being used extensively in the U.S. According to Ton-That, the Russian invasion presented another implementation for the technology. "We saw images of people who were prisoners of war and fleeing situations," Mr Ton-That says "It got us thinking that this could potentially be a technology that could be useful for identification, and also verification." Last month, Ukrainian defence authorities began using facial recognition technology.

Ukraine's defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI's facial recognition technology, the company's chief executive said after the US 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 US presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The plans started forming after Russia invaded Ukraine and Clearview Chief Executive Hoan Ton-That sent a letter to Kyiv offering assistance, according to a copy seen by Reuters. Clearview said it had not offered the technology to Russia, which calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation". Ukraine's Ministry of Defense did not reply to requests for comment.

Ukraine is using Clearview AI's facial recognition software to uncover Russian assailants and identify Ukrainians who've sadly lost their lives in the conflict. The company's chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told Reuters that Ukraine's defence ministry began using the software on Saturday. Clearview AI's facial recognition system is controversial but indisputably powerful--using billions of images scraped from the web to identify just about anyone. Ton-That says that Clearview has more than two billion images from Russian social media service VKontakte alone. Reuters says that Ton-That sent a letter to Ukrainian authorities offering Clearview AI's assistance.

Ukraine is now using Clearview AI's facial recognition technology for purposes such as identifying Russian soldiers, its CEO claimed. Hoan Ton-That told Reuters the company offered Ukraine's defense ministry free access to its system following the invasion by Russia. According to the report, Clearview suggested Ukraine could use the tech to reunite refugees with family members, fight misinformation, assess at checkpoints whether someone is a person of interest and to identify dead bodies. The company hasn't offered its technology to Russia. Engadget has contacted the defense ministry for comment.