The company first came under scrutiny this week when it was
discovered that its cloud computing business was promoting facial recognition
software that could identify people by ethnicity.“Racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form
violates Alibaba’s policies and values,” the company said in a statement on
Thursday. “We are dismayed to learn that Alibaba Cloud developed a facial
recognition technology in a testing environment that included ethnicity as an
algorithm attribute for tagging video imagery.”
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stories originating in China.
“We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to
target or identify specific ethnic groups,” the company added. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China
Morning Post . The company declined to comment
further for this story.
Also on Thursday, new rumours emerged from a Radio Free
Asia report alleging the company was being investigated by
China’s central government. Alibaba denied the allegation, saying it has
benefited from government supervision, which it credits with helping the
company’s “healthy development”.
The facial recognition controversy was kicked off by reports on
Wednesday. According to web pages discovered by surveillance industry
publication IPVM, and reported by The New York Times,
Alibaba Cloud advertised software features on its official website that could
help online platforms single out the faces of minorities as part of its
“content security” service. The feature is a part of Alibaba’s Cloud Shield
solution, which “detects and recognises text, pictures, videos, and voices
containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements and spam,”
according to the materials published by IPVM.