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Rights Group Corrects Report Tying Megvii to Xinjiang Police

Rights Group Corrects Report Linking Megvii to Xinjiang Police

(Bloomberg) -- Human Rights Watch has withdrawn an assertion from a May report that linked rising Chinese AI star Megvii and its facial recognition software to an app used in controversial mass surveillance in the western region of Xinjiang.

The influential watchdog said in last month’s report that a mobile app used by police to track citizens in Xinjiang, home to minority Uighurs accused of supporting an independent state, used Megvii’s technology to match faces with photo identification and cross-check pictures on different documents. But the New York-based organization corrected the report this week, saying the code it discovered in the app’s log-in function -- by reverse-engineering the app -- proved “inoperable.”

The group confirmed that information based on its own examination of the software after it was contacted by Megvii, the Beijing-based company backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which develops image-recognition under the Face++ brand. Code in the app’s log-in function was never actively used, the rights group said in an updated version of its report.

Megvii is one of five Chinese companies that the Trump Administration is said to be considering adding to a list of banned entities, a move that would cut it off from American technology and escalate tensions between Washington and Beijing. The company has said it is “not aware of being on any U.S. government list.”

The Human Rights Watch report was based on an investigation into the police app, which it said communicates with a database known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. The group said it enlisted a cybersecurity firm to conduct a technical assessment after finding that it was publicly available online last year. Megvii, which sells licenses to use its algorithms to other companies, has said it doesn’t maintain any relationship with the database and had no knowledge of why its code appeared in the police app.

In a statement posted online, Human Rights Watch said it was correcting facts but stood by the thrust of its report.

“Our recommendations are pertinent to any company providing public security technology operating in Xinjiang,” the watchdog said.

IJOP is mainly a tool for data collection, filing reports and prompting “investigative missions” by police. The report called for China to shut down the database behind the app, and for foreign governments to impose targeted sanctions such as visa bans and asset freezes against leaders in Xinjiang.

“We appreciate the corrections made by Human Rights Watch. We are serious about the responsible use of AI technologies, and pledge to work with the global AI community to ensure positive impacts of these technologies, and to avoid any abusive use of them,” Megvii said in an emailed statement.

Human Rights Watch said the mobile app was developed by a unit of state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corp, a Fortune 500 company with $30 billion in revenue and 169,000 employees. CETC didn’t respond to calls and emails requesting comment on the report.

To contact the reporter on this story: Blake Schmidt in Hong Kong at bschmidt16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Ten Kate at dtenkate@bloomberg.net, Edwin Chan

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