Huawei accused of creating facial recognition against Uighurs

In the meantime one wonders if the Biden presidency will be softer in his regards, Huawei continues to receive accusations from the Western world. And that of these days is quite heavy, given that there is the racial persecution of which she is accused China against Uighurs. After being accused (again) of espionage against Cisco, the Chinese company was put in the spotlight for allegedly creating a facial recognition able to identify people of this ethnicity.

The question of the Uighurs is rather delicate: if you are interested, I invite you to get an idea by reading the dedicated articles from Il Post. Trying to summarize, the Uighurs are a Muslim minority of Turkish origin living in Xinjiang, a northwestern region of China. In this area the government implements an important population tracking, due to terrorism problems encountered by the government and political / social tensions linked to ethnicity and religion. Several times, then, the existence of detention centers has been denounced where about one million Uyghurs are held and "re-educated". Fields that China has denied existence, despite photographic evidence, including satellite, to support.

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New accusation against Huawei: it would have created a facial scanning system to recognize Uighurs

But what does Huawei have to do with all this? The Washington Post editorial team drew attention to a official document (now removed from the site), unearthed by the IPVM research center, which mentions a facial recognition project carried out in 2018 in collaboration with the group Megvii. Group ended up in the infamous Blacklists by USA, as accused of being involved in the development of technologies that would favor the aforementioned behavior of China.

This system would allow to frame a group of people and recognize the age, sex and ethnicity of each individual. But what really attracted attention is the presence of the so-called "Uyghurs alarm". A feature that would allow you to send an alert when an individual apparently part of this ethnic group appears under the cameras. According to the complaint, Huawei would have participated in the creation of this system, providing servers, imaging systems and cloud computing services. Huawei has limited itself to stating that the product is only in the testing phase but denying having provided software. Megvii, on the other hand, denied creating systems that undermine the safety of ethnic minorities.