Huawei in ‘terrifying’ spy camera experiment

The Chinese technology giant huawei has been testing facial recognition systems that can identify members of t he persecuted Uighur minority group and alert the authorities to their presence.

Documents uncovered on the company’s website reveal it helped test artificial intelligence (AI) software that can scan faces in a crowd and pick out people’s age, sex and ethnicity.

A report on the test revealed the system could then trigger a ‘Uighur alarm’, potentially flagging individuals to the Chinese authorities, who have been cracking down on the mostly Muslim minority group.

The system was successful in picking out Uighurs during a trial using photos, the report said.

John honovich, founder of the research organisation IPVM, who discovered the document, said it showed how ‘terrifying’ yet ‘totally normalised’ the use of such camera technology has become.

he told The Washington Post: ‘This is not one isolated company. This is systematic. A lot of thought went into making sure this “Uighur alarm” works.’

China has been accused of abusing Uighurs in the north-west of the country by sending them to ‘re- education’ camps, sterilising women and using them as slave labour in factories.

It is thought that up to one million Uighurs have been detained since 2016. In the camps, they are forced to abandon their culture and l earn Mandarin, human rights groups say.

Maya Wang, from human Rights Watch, said: ‘China’s surveillance ambition goes way, way, way beyond minority persecution.

‘The persecution of minorities is obviously not exclusive to China… and these systems would lend themselves quite well to countries that want to criminalise minorities.’

A separate report from human Rights Watch yesterday said Uighurs were ‘arbitrarily’ selected by a Chinese police program that flagged suspicious behaviour.

The campaign group added that it was further evidence of ‘how China’s brutal repression… is being turbocharged by technology’.

The huawei test was conducted with the facial recognition start-up firm Megvii. Both companies confirmed the report was real but huawei said the system ‘is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application’.

Megvii is one of a number of Chinese firms hit with sanctions by the United States last year for alleged involvement in ‘human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance’.

huawei has also been sanctioned by Washington and British telecoms firms have been told to stop using its equipment from next September before a total ban in 2027.

The company, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment supplier, has been labelled a security risk because of its ties to the Chinese state.

‘Brutal repression by technology’