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Shanghai, China
Alibaba Group has said it would not allow its technology to be used for targetting and identifying specific ethnic groups, following a report that its facial recognition technology can pick out Uighur minorities.
Alibaba, in a statement Thursday, said it was "dismayed" that Alibaba Cloud developed facial recognition technology that includes ethnicity as an attribute for tagging video imagery and that the firm never intended the technology to be used in this manner.
"We have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering," Alibaba said.
US-based IPVM in a report published on Wednesday said software capable of identifying Uighurs appears in Alibaba's Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites.
Surveillance industry researcher IPVM's report came as human rights groups accuse China of forcing over 1 million Muslim Uighurs into labour camps, and call out firms suspected of complicity.
IPVM said mention of Uighurs in the software disappeared near the time it published its report, and that Alibaba told it the feature has only been used "in a testing environment".
Alibaba described Cloud Shield as a system that "detects and recognises text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities."
An archived record of the technology shows it can perform such tasks as "glasses inspection", "smile detection", whether the subject is "ethnic" and, specifically, "Is it Uighur".
Consequently, if a Uighur livestreams a video on a website signed up to Cloud Shield, the software can detect that the user is Uighur and flag the video for review or removal, IPVM researcher Charles Rollet told Reuters.
Contrary to these findings, China has repeatedly denied forcing anyone into what it has called vocational training centres, and has also said the region of Xinjiang is under threat from Islamist militants.
(with inputs)