Alibaba was “dismayed” by reports that it used its software to identify Uighurs

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The Chinese technology company released its statement after The New York Times and IPVM, a surveillance industry publication, reported that an Alibaba division showed its customers how they could use their technology to identify members of Alibaba. the Uyghur community in videos and images.
The system was created by Alibaba’s cloud computing team and allegedly included the example: “Is he an Uyghur?” according to a report, according to a report. A code was also included to recognize if someone was “minority” or “Asian”.

In a statement on Thursday, Alibaba said it was “dismayed to learn that Alibaba Cloud developed facial recognition technology in a test environment that included ethnicity as an algorithm attribute for tagging video images.”

Alibaba did not mention Uighurs in its statement or explain how or why the system was built in the first place. But he stressed that the technology had been limited to testing, and “no customer deployed it.”

“We never intended for our technology to be used and we will not allow it to be used to target specific ethnic groups,” the company said. “We have removed any ethnic labels from our product offering.”

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China has long been accused of repressing Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups, especially in the western Xinjiang region.
The U.S. State Department estimates that since 2015, up to two million Uighur Muslims and other Turkish minorities have been imprisoned in huge re-education camps in Xinjiang. Beijing has long advocated repression in Xinjiang as necessary to combat extremism and terrorism.

Although Alibaba said that “racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates Alibaba’s policies and values,” he declined to comment on whether any employees involved in the project faced disciplinary action. .

The company also declined to comment on how the system could have been tested without official knowledge or approval from Alibaba.

While Alibaba insists the technology was not deployed commercially, the company explicitly promoted it to customers on a website that promoted its cloud services, according to the New York Times.

“Alibaba’s website for its cloud computing business showed how customers could use their software to detect the faces of [Uyghurs] and other ethnic minorities in pictures and videos, according to the site’s pages, “the Times wrote.

When the Times questioned Alibaba about the matter, the technology company “edited its website to remove the references,” according to the newspaper. Alibaba declined to comment.

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Alibaba, one of China’s most valuable corporations, has grown to become the world’s third-largest cloud service provider, according to research firm Gartner.

The Hangzhou-based company is the latest technology giant facing scrutiny over possible surveillance of Uighurs. Last week, Huawei faced a similar controversy after IPVM accused the Chinese smartphone maker of testing similar technologies.

In a joint investigation with The Washington Post, the news center reported that Huawei had tried to add so-called “Uyghur alarms” to its facial recognition software, which would identify members of the minority group and then alert police.

Huawei later said it was investigating the issue, though it refused to work to “develop or sell systems that identify people by their ethnic group.”

“We take the allegations in the Washington Post article very seriously,” the company said in a statement to CNN Business. “We do not and will not support the use of technology to discriminate against vulnerable or marginalized groups.”

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