Alibaba says its technology won't target Uighurs

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Alibaba says its technology won't target Uighurs
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has said it will not allow its technology to be used for targeting or identifying specific ethnic groups.
The statement follows reports that the company’s content moderation technology can pick out Uighur minorities.
Alibaba said it was “dismayed' that Alibaba Cloud developed facial technology that includes ethnicity as an attribute for tagging video imagery.
"We have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering," Alibaba said.
The firm said it never intended the technology to be used in this manner.
US-based surveillance industry researcher IPVM published a report on Wednesday that said software capable of identifying Uighurs appears in Alibaba’s Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites.
Alibaba describes 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.”
IPVM said mention of Uighurs in the software disappeared around the time it published its report.
Alibaba - which is listed in New York and Hong Kong - is the biggest cloud computing vendor in China and the fourth worldwide, according to data from researcher Canalys.
Earlier this week one of Huawei's European communications managers resigned from the Chinese firm over concerns about its role in the surveillance of Muslim Uighurs.
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