Major camera company can sort people by race, alert police when it spots Uighurs

Facial recognition software developed by China-based Dahua, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance technology, purports to detect the race of individuals caught on camera and offers to alert police clients when it identifies members of the Turkic ethnic group Uighurs. Dahua was added to the U.S. entity list in 2019, along with 27 other companies including the tech giant Huawei, for its ties to “human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression,” according to the Department of Commerce. Screenshots provided by IPVM show product support documents for Dahua’s police surveillance platform that include several references to “real-time warning for Uighurs.” Screenshots show that the real-time warning feature requires specific equipment to “support reporting Uighur attributes.” The documents also reference “real-time warning for non-local Uighurs.” Along with tracking members of the ethnic group, the service touts its broad facial recognition capabilities. At the time, Dahua said in a statement to the South China Morning Post that it “does not sell products that feature ethnicity-focused recognition function.” Additional screenshots from a consumer-facing Dahua platform for examining footage captured using company cameras show a “race” filter available to some users.