Hong Kong (CNN Business) Alibaba (BABA) says that it has stopped trying to identify faces by ethnicity after the company was accused this week of creating a facial recognition system meant to detect Uyghurs. in an algorithm, according to the The system was built by Alibaba's cloud computing team, and allegedly included the example: "Is this a Uyghur? In a statement Thursday, Alibaba said that it was "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." Alibaba did not mention Uyghurs in its statement, or explain how or why the system was built in the first place. But it stressed that the technology had been limited to trials, and "was not deployed by any customer."

Source: CNN December 18, 2020 14:03 UTC