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Incident 107: Chinese Tech Firms Allegedly Developed Facial Recognition to Identify People by Race, Targeting Uyghur Muslims

Description: Various Chinese firms were revealed by patent applications to have developed facial recognition capable of detecting people by race, which critics feared would enable persecution and discrimination of Uyghur Muslims.

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Entities

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Alleged: Huawei , Megvii , SenseTime , Alibaba and Baibu developed an AI system deployed by none, which harmed Uyghur people.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
107
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2018-07-20
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Applied Taxonomies
GMF, MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
 

1.1. Unfair discrimination and misrepresentation

Risk Domain

The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
 
  1. Discrimination and Toxicity

Entity

Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
 

Human

Timing

The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
 

Pre-deployment

Intent

Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
 

Intentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrenceAlibaba ‘dismayed’ by its cloud unit’s ethnicity detection algorithm – TechCrunchSurveillance group exposes disturbing Huawei patent for AI-powered Uighur detection
Alibaba ‘dismayed’ by its cloud unit’s ethnicity detection algorithm – TechCrunch

Alibaba ‘dismayed’ by its cloud unit’s ethnicity detection algorithm – TechCrunch

techcrunch.com

Surveillance group exposes disturbing Huawei patent for AI-powered Uighur detection

Surveillance group exposes disturbing Huawei patent for AI-powered Uighur detection

thenextweb.com

Alibaba ‘dismayed’ by its cloud unit’s ethnicity detection algorithm – TechCrunch
techcrunch.com · 2020

Chinese tech giants have drawn international criticism after research showed they have technologies that enable the authorities to profile Muslim Uyghurs.

The cloud computing unit of Alibaba, Alibaba Cloud, developed a facial recognition al…

Surveillance group exposes disturbing Huawei patent for AI-powered Uighur detection
thenextweb.com · 2021

A Huawei patent that mentions AI-powered identification of Uighur people and other ethnic groups has been discovered.

The patent was exposed by video surveillance research group IPVM, the same organization that had previously spotted refere…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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