SHANGHAI (CHINA) – According to surveillance industry researcher IPVM’s report, Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd possesses facial recognition technology which can specifically identify those belonging to the Uighur minority in China.
This comes in the wake of rights groups accusing Beijing of forcing more than one million Uighurs, who are Muslims, into labour camps.
Meanwhile, China has rebuffed claims that it has forced anyone to attend vocational training centres and said the region of Xinjiang faces the threat of Islamist militants.
Chinese companies are very cautious and they often deploy self-censoring to avoid ruffling the feathers of the government, which strictly cotrols online speech. Last month, Beijing came out with draft rules to monitor livestreaming.
IPVM, which is based in the US, came out with the report on Wednesday in which it said that software capable of spotting Uighurs appears in Alibaba’s Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites.
According to Alibaba, Cloud Shield is as a system that can “detect and recognise text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provide verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities.”
According to the archived record of the technology, it can perform tasks such as “glasses inspection”, “smile detection”, whether the subject is “ethnic” and, specifically, “Is it Uighur”.
Consequently, if a member of the Uighur community livestreams a video on a website signed up to Cloud Shield, the software can easily find out that the user is a Uighur and flag the content for review or removal, said IPVM researcher Charles Rollet.
