According to the New York Times on December 17, tech giant Alibaba is teaching its corporate customers how to get involved as the Chinese government tracks and persecutes the country’s muslim-majority minorities.
Alibaba’s cloud-computing business 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 the MONITORING industry publication IPVM and shared with the New York Times. 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.
The discovery is likely to push one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies into the storm of international condemnation of China’s treatment of its Muslim minority.
As part of its alleged counter-terrorism campaign, the Chinese government has sent tens of thousands of Uighurs and other groups to re-education camps and has rolled out an extensive surveillance network to keep tabs on them through facial recognition and genetic testing. The U.S. government and other countries have condemned the project and punished Chinese companies believed to be involved.
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 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.”
The company declined to give more information about the test or explain why information about the feature was included in the official profile of the software. The company also declined to comment on why it has been testing the tool for minority faces.
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