Ukraine is using facial recognition technology to identify Russian soldiers killed in the war and then track down their families to inform them of their deaths.
Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers since Moscow’s invasion began, The Washington Post reported.
A volunteer force of hackers known as Ukraine's IT Army has used the identifications to tell the families of 582 Russians that their sons have been killed in war, according to The Post.
They've even sent photos of dead sons back to their parents, the report added.
Ukraine is using software free of charge from Clearview AI, which has a database of 20 billion faces gathered from public internet sites, including the Russian social media site VKontakte, The New York Times reported.
A user uploads a photo or video and Clearview checks its database for any images that match faces. A single cadaver scan can also return identifying information such as family photos, social media posts and relationship details, according to The Post.
In the case of identifying dead Russian soldiers, officials are using the software to locate the men's social media accounts and then send messages to their relatives.
"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 they've lost their sons and to then enable them to come to collect their bodies," Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister, told Reuters.
Hoan Ton-That, the chief executive of Clearview AI, told The Times he offered the company's services to Ukraine after the Russian government claimed a group of soldiers captured there were actors.
"I thought if Ukrainians could use Clearview, they could get more information to verify their identities," he said.
Some civil rights groups are against Ukraine's use of Clearview, which is facing a series of privacy lawsuits in the U.S., over concerns that the wrong person could possibly be misidentified as deceased, Reuters noted. The company responded by saying facial matches should always be verified by investigators.
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