US-based IPVM in a report published on Wednesday said software capable of identifying Uighurs appears in Alibaba's Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites. Alibaba describes Cloud Shield as a system that "detects and recognises text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities." IPVM said mention of Uighurs in the software disappeared near the time it published its report. Alibaba in a statement said it was "dismayed" that Alibaba Cloud developed facial recognition software that includes ethnicity as an attribute for tagging video imagery, and that it never intended the software to be used in this manner. It is the biggest cloud computing vendor in China and the fourth worldwide, showed data from researcher Canalys.

Source: bd News24 December 18, 2020 01:41 UTC