The New York Times reported on December 16 that Chinese tech giant Alibaba is offering facial recognition software that allows business users to identify the Ethnic Uighurs of Xinjiang province. It is understood that this could make Alibaba the latest Chinese company to be caught up in the authorities’ crackdown on Muslim minorities.
Alibaba’s cloud computing site shows how customers can use its software to detect faces of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in images and videos, according to a web page discovered by IPVM, a U.S. Internet video monitoring and research firm, and shared with the New York Times, the report said. The feature is built into Alibaba’s software to help online platforms monitor digital content related to terrorism, pornography and other dangerous categories, the website said. It is unclear whether or how Alibaba’s customers use the ethnic-minority detection tool. But the risk of abuse is high. For example, social media platforms can automatically tag videos for additional censorship and even alert authorities if the videos contain faces that the software identifies as Uighurs.
After the New York Times asked Alibaba about the tool this week, the company edited its website to remove references to Faces of Uighurs and ethnic minorities. “The reference to race refers to a feature or function that is used in a test environment as we explore our technical capabilities,” a representative for Aliyun said in a written statement. “It has never been used outside of a test environment.” Alibaba declined to give more information about the tests or explain why information about the feature was included in the software’s official profile. The company also declined to comment on why it has been testing the tool for minority faces.
Alibaba’s shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange and are held by large international investors. Global brands such as Nike, Starbucks and Ralph Lauren have all used their platforms to sell to Chinese consumers. Alibaba is also an official cloud service partner for the Games. Last year, the US government blacklisted 28 Chinese entities, including surveillance equipment makers and artificial intelligence start-ups, over concerns about their role in the crackdown. Last month, the White House barred Americans from investing in a group of companies backed by the Chinese military, in an effort to cut off Chinese companies’ access to U.S. capital markets.
The Washington Post reported last week that Chinese telecommunications giant huawei has tested software that automatically alerts police when surveillance cameras spot Uighur faces. The report cited a document found on huawei’s website that led Antoine Griezmann, the French soccer star, to announce he was ending his relationship with the company. He has been a brand ambassador for Huawei’s smartphones. A Huawei spokesman told the Washington Post that the tool was “just a test.”
Alibaba’s website had previously said the tool used to detect faces of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities was part of its “content security” service, the report said. The service helps Alibaba’s cloud customers tag potentially risky material in images, videos, text and documents uploaded from its digital platform. “As government regulation becomes more and more stringent, these are tasks that need to be taken seriously and managed by websites and platforms,” alibaba.com explained. According to Alibaba.com, the content security service can use still pictures and videos to perform “facial recognition of sensitive people”. When obtaining an image of a face, the software can look for features, including whether the person is wearing glasses or smiling, the site’s description says.
The report notes that before Alibaba changed the description this week, the company said the software could also assess two other attributes: whether a person is of ‘Asian’ ancestry and whether he or she is a ‘minority’ — a parenthetic-to-bracket description on another page that refers to uighurs. The company’s online documentation for the same software in English makes no mention of testing for ethnic minorities, which could indicate that the feature is mainly used by Chinese customers. Alibaba is not the only company in China to peddle automated tools for analyzing ethnic characteristics.
Kingsoft Cloud, a Chinese Cloud computing service provider, described technology on its website that could use facial images to predict “race” and other features, the report said. According to a page and document on Jinshan Cloud’s website that THE IPVM discovered and shared with The Times, the company’s software can assess whether a person’s ethnicity is “Uighur” or “non-Uighur.” After New York Times asked Jinshanyun for information about the software, the company removed the pages from its website. In a written statement, it said the tools were never sold to customers and that it was unable to distinguish Uighur faces.
The statement said the software passed the company’s internal review process because of lax management, and the company is reviewing the review mechanism to ensure oversight is in place. “Labels based on any race are inappropriate and inconsistent with Jinshanyun’s policies and values,” jinshan’s statement said. The statement said. “Our products will never attempt to identify and label a particular race.” It is understood that Jinshan cloud listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
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