‘Huawei contributed to four surveillance systems with ethnicity recognition’

In addition to the camera system that recognizes Uyghurs, Huawei has co-developed four more surveillance systems, with which governments can determine the ethnicity of passers-by. Until recently, Huawei promoted it on its own site.

Huawei developed the systems with four different companies, The Washington Post reports. Promotional material for the projects could be found on Huawei’s own sites. The first is a system that Huawei created with Beijing Xintiandi Information Technology for aerial photography, which allows governments to track visitors to cities in 3D and identify their identity, including their ethnicity.

A system that Huawei made with SenseTime should prevent Chinese citizens from ‘illegally’ going to a higher government to denounce the wrong decisions of lower officials; those lower officials can use that system, but it is unknown exactly how it works.

With iFlytek, Huawei created a system to identify someone based on voice and thus determine ethnicity. The company iFlytek offers the service and it would run on hardware from Huawei. The US government said earlier that iFlytek is one of the companies the Chinese government has engaged to keep an eye on Uyghurs. The fourth company is Yitu; Huawei is collaborating on this in the development of ‘smart cities’, including projects in the field of facial and voice recognition.

Huawei responded last week to the report that it was testing a camera system to track Uyghurs, stating that the test was diametrically opposed to the values ​​that Huawei adheres to as a company. Huawei examines these new findings from collaborations on projects that help governments identify ethnicity through surveillance. The company denies designing systems that aim to determine ethnicity. “We do not condone the use of our technology to discriminate or oppress members of a community,” Huawei said.