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SHANGHAI: Tech giant Alibaba has facial recognition technology that can specifically target members of China’s Uyghur minority, the IPVM surveillance industry researcher said in a report.
The report comes as human rights groups accuse China of forcing more than a million Uighur Muslims into labor camps and denounce companies suspected of complicity.
China has repeatedly denied forcing anyone to enter what it has called vocational training centers, and has also said that the Xinjiang region is threatened by militants.
Still, the sensitivity has sparked caution among Chinese internet companies who often self-censor themselves to avoid running into conflict with a government that strictly controls online speech, and which last month published draft rules to control streaming on. alive.
US-based IPVM, in a report published on Wednesday (December 16), said that software capable of identifying Uyghurs appears on Alibaba’s Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites.
Alibaba describes Cloud Shield as a system that “detects and recognizes text, images, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertising, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom settings, and other capabilities.”
An archived log of the technology shows that it can perform tasks such as “glasses inspection”, “smile detection” if the subject is “ethnic” and specifically “Is he Uighur”.
Consequently, if a Uyghur broadcasts a video live on a Cloud Shield-registered website, the software can detect that the user is Uighur and flag the video for review or deletion, IPVM researcher Charles Rollet told Reuters.
IPVM said the mention of Uyghurs in the software disappeared around the time it published its report, and that Alibaba told it the feature had only been used “in a test environment.” Alibaba did not provide comment following Reuters’s request.
Alibaba is listed on the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges. It is the largest provider of cloud computing in China and the fourth in the world, data from researcher Canalys showed.
Earlier this month, US lawmakers sent letters to Intel and Nvidia following reports that their computer chips were being used in surveillance of Uighurs.
