Tracking Uyghurs: Huawei worked on facial recognition project, says report

San Francisco, Dec 9 (IANS) Huawei worked with another Chinese technology company called Megvii on a facial recognition system to track and monitor Uyghur minorities, said a new report from IPVM, a leading video surveillance information source.

The findings revealed on Tuesday are based on a "confidential" report hosted publicly on Huawei's own European website. After IPVM researchers found the report, the platform worked with The Washington Post to make the findings public. The report said that Huawei tested Megvii face recognition on the company's video cloud infrastructure. The system, designed to recognise people belonging to the Uyghur Muslim minority community and alert police, apparently "passed" in the test. In response to the IPVM report Huawei, however, reportedly said that the system "has not seen real-world application."IPVM also said that the test mentioned in the Huawei internal report did not say where this software is deployed. Megvii, in its response to IPVM, said that it "solutions are not designed or customised to target or label ethnic groups."The company said that its "business is focused on the well-being and safety of individuals, not about monitoring any particular demographic groups."However, tools which detect whether a face is Uyghur is popular with police in China, IPVM said in its report, adding that it identified a dozen departments deploying the tech. The report comes at a time when China has been facing criticism from human rights activists around the world for its treatment of Uighur Muslim minority..