Tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) offered facial-recognition software that could enable users to identify Uighurs, a report said, becoming the latest Chinese company embroiled in the Beijing’s controversial treatment of the Muslim minority.
Alibaba’s Web site for its cloud-computing business showed how clients could use the software to detect the facial features of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities within images and videos, the New York Times (NYT) reported.
The references, later removed by Alibaba, appeared on Web pages seen by US-based surveillance research firm IPVM and shared with the newspaper, the Times said.
Photo: Reuters
The report said that the function was only used in a testing capacity and was never offered beyond that, which an Alibaba Cloud spokeswoman confirmed in a statement to reporters yesterday.
“The ethnicity mention refers to a feature/function that was used within a testing environment during an exploration of our technical capability. It was never used outside the testing environment,” she said.
An archived record of the technology (perma.cc/9ZUV-UD2F) showed that it could perform such tasks as “glasses inspection,” “smile detection,” whether the subject is “ethnic” and, specifically: “Is it Uighur.”
Consequently, if a Uighur livestreams a video on a Web site signed up to Cloud Shield, the software could detect that the user is Uighur and flag the video for review or removal, IPVM researcher Charles Rollet told Reuters.
IPVM said mention of Uighurs in the software disappeared near the time it published its report.
Just last week, IPVM said that Huawei Technologies Co (華為) had been involved in testing facial-recognition software that could send alerts to police when it recognized Uighur faces.
Huawei has denied the claims, but two days later, Barcelona’s World Cup-winning soccer player Antoine Griezmann said he was ending an endorsement deal with Huawei over the revelation.
China has come under intense international criticism over its policies in Xinjiang, where rights groups say as many as 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps.
Beijing calls the camps vocational training centers aimed at stamping out terrorism and improving job opportunities.
Surveillance spending in Xinjiang has risen sharply in recent years, with facial recognition, iris scanners, DNA collection and artificial intelligence deployed across the region.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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