, Columnist
Bringing Facial Recognition to War Is a Bad Idea
A startup’s donation of controversial tech to Ukraine could also help distract from its wider problems.
People fleeing the conflict in Ukraine.
Photographer: GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFPThis article is for subscribers only.
Perhaps the saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” holds true for controversial technology companies.
New York-based Clearview AI has been criticized by privacy advocates for years because of the way it has scraped billions of images from social-media networks to build a search engine for faces used by police departments. It was the subject of a New York Times investigation, and several countries including France and Canada have banned the company.