Clearview AI, the facial recognition company backed by Facebook and Palantir investor Peter Thiel, has been contracted to supply the US Air Force with augmented reality glasses combined with facial recognition.

It’s a technology that worried many privacy campaigners when it was first offered by the company, as revealed by a New York Times article in 2020, which analyzed the startup’s code and discovered that it was designed to work with glasses. Clearview had previously sounded the alarm by harvesting billions of images of people’s faces from social media sites like Facebook, creating a huge database for law enforcement and private buyers to identify individuals.

The Air Force contract is just $50,000 and promises to help protect “airfields with augmented reality facial recognition goggles.” According to contract records, first highlighted by Tech Inquiry’s head of technology industry Jack Poulson, there’s little more information on how many pairs of glasses will be supplied or how they will be used.

The Air Force had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. Forbes emailed Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That, a former model who founded the company with backing from Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2017, but had not received a response as of press time. Her company has faced harsh criticism from privacy advocates since she was forced into hiding in 2020 by the media, with the American Civil Liberties Union suing the company for “ending illegal and privacy-destructive surveillance activities of the company”.

Despite the controversies around Clearview, he continued to work with the US federal government. Contract records show the FBI placed an $18,000 order for a one-year subscription in December, while Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) put at least $1.5 million on the table for Clearview tools for any number of enterprise licenses.

“Since September, the Biden administration’s ICE has more than doubled its spending on Clearview AI, the FBI has publicly purchased Clearview AI for the first time, the USPTO has granted Clearview’s patent for augmented reality facial recognition , and now the company has a small business grant with the Air Force for augmented reality,” Poulson said. Forbeshighlighting how successful Ton-That’s business has been, even with the negative press surrounding his collection of citizen facial images.

The company raised another $30 million last year, showing that investors haven’t been put off either, as the private market appears to be lucrative. Report of News Feed previously disclosed that private companies such as the NBA, Macy’s and Walmart have used Clearview’s facial recognition.

It should perhaps come as no surprise that augmented reality technology is being sold to a government agency. Like Forbes reported last year, facial recognition is being applied in multiple ways, including via drones and other unmanned vehicles. In 2020, OneZero reported that the US Air Force gave $2 million to RealNetworks, best known for video streaming software RealPlayer, to put facial recognition on drones and body-worn cameras.