Alibaba 'dismayed' by its ethnicity profiling algorithm
By Caoimhe Toman
Date: Friday 18 Dec 2020
(Sharecast News) - Alibaba said it was "dismayed" after learning that Alibaba Cloud had developed facial recognition technology to identify ethnicity and thus profile "Uyghur" muslims.
According to research from surveillance industry publication IPVM, Alibaba Cloud openly offers Uyghur/'ethnic minority' recognition as a service, allowing customers to be alerted any time Alibaba detects an Uyghur.
Alibaba Cloud quickly deleted mentions of Uyghurs and minority detection on its website after the firm was contacted for comment, said IPVM.
Alibaba Cloud then claimed, without evidence or explanation, that these features were only used "within a testing environment".
The new tech comes as the Chinese government ramps up its policies against Uyghurs and defends what it terms the "vocational training programs" imposed upon its Muslim ethnic minorities, as part of the government's counter-terrorism efforts.
US-listed Alibaba said in a statement that it is "dismayed" by news of the testing of a service that offers "ethnicity as an algorithm" and that "racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates Alibaba's policies and values."
"We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups, and we have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering. This trial technology was not deployed by any customer. We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to target or identify specific ethnic groups," the company added.
Alibaba's cloud unit grew 60% year-over-year to account for nearly 10% of the firm's revenues in the three months ended September.
IPVM and The Washington Post also revealed earlier this month that PRC tech giants Huawei and Megvii tested and validated 'Uyghur alarms' in face rec software meant for police video surveillance projects.
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