Alibaba is China's largest e-commerce company. Listed in New York Stock Exchange as the 'Amazon of China', the company has more than a staggering $700 market cap.
Shortly after one of China's company emerged and allegedly tested an AI “Uighur alarm,” this time, it's Alibaba's turn to be exposed.
The company founded by Jack Ma is accused to have been offering face-recognition software to identify the minority group. What this means, Uighur recognition is said to have gone beyond China police usage, and to the country's internet as the Chinese government cracks down on the repressed "ethnic minority"..
As first reported by video surveillance researchers at IPVM, internet giant Alibaba provided “Uighur-detection-as-a-service” allowing customers to be alerted any time Alibaba detects an Uighur.
According to the researchers, the Alibaba Cloud site showed how customers could use the software to identify whether a person is of “Asian” descent and whether he or she is a “minority” which, as a description on another page added in parentheses, referred to Uighurs.
In the latter's case, in other words, the AI can identify “Uighur” or “non-Uighur” from images and videos.
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In the report, the "Weizu" is a transliteration of 维族, or 'Uighur ethnicity' in Chinese.
According to the discovered API, last updated in May 2019, it was mentioned that the API guide said that it is part of Alibaba's "Cloud Shield" solution, which is meant to detect and recognize text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities.
The Chinese government censors many parts of the internet in the mainland, and punish violators.
To help with the censorship and surveillance, it is said that the Chinese government is relying on many technologies, which include AI solutions from private companies.
And Alibaba Cloud offering called the "ethnic minority" detection, is allegedly one of them.
With Alibaba's technology, the Chinese government that has been cracking down Uighurs for years, could use the technology to, for example, detect when an Uighur is online livestreaming.
When this happens, Alibaba Cloud's AI which can automatically recognize an Uighur face, can flag the video for review or removal before it finds a significant audience, or even prevent it from being posted.
While IPVM couldn't find any deployment examples of Alibaba Cloud's Uighur recognition solution, it should be noted that at this time, Alibaba owns YouKu, which is one of China's top video websites. Alibaba's e-commerce platform also allows livestreaming
Weibo, which is one of China's biggest social media networks, is also one of Alibaba Cloud's clients.
Uighur or anything that can point to the minority group couldn't be found on Alibaba Cloud's English/global websites, suggesting that the feature is likely only used within China.
Soon after Alibaba was contacted for comment, Alibaba Cloud quickly removed the mentions of Uighurs and the alleged minority detection cloud service.
Alibaba also removed the API Guide mentioning Uighurs, which is updated to only reads "sorry, this content is being updated".
In a statement to Alizila, the news hub for Alibaba Group, the company said that:
The statement suggests that the software had slipped past the company’s internal review processes, and that Alibaba was evaluating those mechanisms to ensure proper oversight.
While references to the system have been removed from the website, IPVM has published translated screenshots and archives of the pages.
IPVM collaborated on this report with The New York Times, which has also published its own report.
Further reading: More Chinese Companies Have Patents For AI-Powered Uighur Detection, Research Found
