Ukraine uses facial recognition software to identify Russian soldiers killed in combat

Clearview offered its service free of charge to Ukraine after the Russian invasion and has said its search engine includes over 2bn images from VKontakte, a popular Russian social media service. VKontakte did not respond to a request for comment.

A New York based software company, Clearview AI has sparked criticism over its privacy practices from users and authorities around the world.

Just this month, Italy fined the company ¤20m for violating EU consumer privacy laws and ordered the company to delete all its data on Italian residents. Earlier, both the UK Information Commissioner Office and authorities in France demanded that Clearview AI stop processing all user data.

Clearview has said its actions have been legal, and that its face matches should only be a starting point in investigations.

Obtaining pre-death samples of such data from enemy fighters is challenging, though, opening the door to innovative techniques such as facial recognition.

But clouded eyes and injured and expressionless faces potentially render facial recognition unusable on the dead, said Bassed, who has been researching the technology.

Fedorov said Ukraine was not using the technology to identify its own troops killed in battle. He did not specify why.

In the US, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System said it has not adopted automated facial recognition because the technology is not currently generally accepted in the forensic community.