Alibaba Cloud Developed Facial Recognition to Profile Muslim Uyghur Minorities

December 16, 2020

Alibaba Cloud's cloud computing division unveiled a facial recognition system allegedly capable of identifying ethnicity, sparking concerns from international human rights advocates. The technology, if used without proper safeguards, could potentially be employed to profile and discriminate against Muslim ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs, posing significant risks to trustworthy AI governance.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.694, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.684, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.674, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: Alibaba
Alleged developer: Alibaba Cloud
Alleged harmed parties: Uyghur people

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/130

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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