Chinese surveillance giant expanding in the US attracts scrutiny over possible targeting of Uygurs
- After cybersecurity researchers found code with an ethnic designation for Uygurs, Dahua promptly pulled and updated the code on its website
- Dahua, the second largest surveillance company in China, rebranded its product lines in North America following a US$10 million deal with Amazon this year
A Chinese surveillance company with eyes on the US market has fallen under scrutiny after researchers found software code that appears to enable ethnic profiling of China’s Uygur minority using artificial intelligence.
Zhejiang Dahua Technology is one of several Chinese AI and surveillance companies that was barred from importing US technology over its purported role in targeting Uygurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in the country’s western Xinjiang region. Despite this, Dahua has been pushing to expand in the US this year, with a rebranding effort last month and a deal with Amazon in April.
One of the functions of the code seems to be AI recognition in video feeds, which includes recognising people and related attributes, according to software security engineer Serge Bazanski, also known as q3k, who made the discovery. Identifiable characteristics in the code include a section for ethnicity, with Uygur as the only ethnicity classified by name.
When asked about the code, Dahua denied that it was selling the ability to identify people by ethnicity.
“Dahua Technology does not sell products that feature [an] ethnicity-focused recognition function,” the company responded by email.
While the code may not have been sold, it was open source and freely available online as a software development kit (SDK). The software manual explains that the development kit is used to write software that can interact with Dahua’s surveillance products, including cameras.
“Usually when you write these SDKs you kind of set them in stone, and you don’t put things there accidentally or just in case,” Bazanski said.