Alibaba criticised for racial profiling through facial recognition

The company says such features were only used 'within a testing environment'

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has developed facial recognition technology trained to detect members of China's Uyghur minority in videos.

In a report published on Wednesday, US-based surveillance industry publication IPVM said that it found details of a digital 'alarm' on the website of Alibaba's cloud unit. IPVM said the alarm uses facial recognition technology to alert customers of the presence of "Uyghur/ethnic minority" faces in their uploaded images or videos.

According to IPVM, Alibaba's cloud unit openly offered the new "Uyghur Recognition As A Service" on its website. However, references to the feature were removed after Alibaba Cloud was questioned about it.

In a statement, Alibaba Group said that it was "dismayed" over the fact that its cloud unit had developed software to tag ethnicity in videos. The company stated that such features were never intended to be deployed to customers and were only used "within a testing environment".

"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," the Group added.

IPVM said that software which can identify Uighurs also appears in Alibaba's Cloud Shield content moderation service, which the company describes as a system capable of monitoring digital content for material related to pornography, terrorism and other sensitive categories.

The report about Alibaba's facial recognition technology has come at the time many human rights groups in the West accuse China of oppressing Muslim Uyghur people and forcing them into concentration camps established in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region that is home to many Uyghurs.

Uyghurs are a large ethnic and religious minority within China. It is alleged that the Chinese government has moved more than a million Uyghurs to detention camps, in an attempt to suppress their culture. China denies such claims and states that the purpose of those camps is to educate Uyghur people and to provide them vocational training, as part of what it calls counter-terrorism efforts.

Recently, Huawei admitted that it had created a system that can detect Uyghurs but added that the system had not been put into production for any clients.

Earlier this month, US lawmakers sent letters to Nvidia and Intel after some reports claimed that their computer chips were used in the surveillance of the Uyghur people.