Alibaba ‘appalled’ by reports that its software was used to identify Uyghurs

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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 to use its technology to identify members of the Uyghur community in videos and images. .
The system was built by Alibaba’s cloud computing team, and would include the example, “Is this an Uyghur?” in an algorithm, the report said. It also reportedly included code to recognize whether someone was a “minority” or “Asian”.

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

Alibaba did not mention Uyghurs in his statement, nor did he explain how or why the system was built in the first place. But it emphasized that the technology was limited to trial versions and was “not deployed by any customer.”

“We never intended that our technology would be used for and will not allow it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups,” the company said. “We have removed every ethnic tag in our product offering.”

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China has long been accused of oppressing Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, particularly in the country’s western Xinjiang region.
The US State Department estimates that as many as two million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkish minorities have been imprisoned in massive re-education camps in Xinjiang since 2015. Beijing has long defended the crackdown in Xinjiang as necessary to tackle extremism and terrorism.

Although Alibaba said that “racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form is contrary to Alibaba’s policies and values,” it declined to comment on whether employees involved in the project were faced with 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 has not been rolled out commercially, the company has explicitly promoted it to customers on a website promoting its cloud services, according to The New York Times.

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

When the Times questioned Alibaba on the matter, “the technology company edited its website to remove the references,” the paper said. Alibaba declined to comment on the matter.

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

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

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

Huawei later said it was investigating the issue, although it denied working on “developing or selling systems that identify people based on their ethnic group.”

“We take the allegations in the Washington Post article very seriously,” the company said in a statement to CNN Business. “We never, ever will support the use of technology to discriminate against vulnerable or marginalized groups.”

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