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
The government yesterday approved applications by Alphabet Inc’s Google to invest NT$27.08 billion (US$859.98 million) in Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement. The Department of Investment Review approved two investments proposed by Google, with much of the funds to be used for data processing and electronic information supply services, as well as inventory procurement businesses in the semiconductor field, the ministry said. It marks the second consecutive year that Google has applied to increase its investment in Taiwan. Google plans to infuse NT$25.34 billion into Charter Investments Ltd (特許投資顧問) through its Singapore-based subsidiary Fructan Holdings Singapore Pte Ltd, and
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
RSS