> seems possible, or even likely, that they used the pictures to train targeting for military drones

Clarifai's usecase is around unstructured image data search which is fairly useful in cleansing and less so in targeting.

More fundamentally, almost the entire tech industry touched Project Maven - it was massive. And that was just 1 of multiple initiatives led by the DoD.

And most other great and regional powers like China, Russia, Japan, France, India, South Korea, Turkiye, etc have all been working on similar projects for a decade.

It doesn't matter what country you live in - no nation will leave capabilities on the table. Heck, a highschooler with knowledge of OpenCV and the Google Earth API can build targeting capabilities similar to what superpowers had a decade ago.

It's 2026 - the Ukraine War started in 2014; the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni Civil Wars in 2011; the Congo War reignited in 2015; the Afghan War continued until 2022; the Myanmar Civil War reignited in 2021; etc - there has now been over a decade of constant development of dual use technologies in both conflicts and civilian applications.

Technology has always had a military component - heck, much of the "civilian" technologies in the 1990s-2000s were refined and tested thanks to Gulf War 1 and the Yugoslav Wars.

Or, framed in another manner - the capabilities disclosed as part of the Snowden Leaks in 2013 were already in production 20 years ago. It is 2026.

There is a sense of starry-eyed idealism amongst a subset of techies who didn't seem to realize that technology has always been dual use.

Maybe privacy concerns aren't your biggest concerns, but they are for the FTC for a case like this.