Hikvision advertises ethnicity-recognition technology despite sanctions

Hikvision promotes ethnicity-recognition features to European clients.

The Chinese maker of surveillance cameras Hikvision advertised ethnicity-recognition technology to European clients. The Guardian reports.

In the brochure published on the website, the company offered a range of features developed in cooperation with the British startup FaiceTech and an unnamed Italian firm.

These include facial recognition to bolster security in retail, border control, and anti-money-laundering checks for banks.

The brochure also advertised “additional algorithms for demographic analysis of the face,” including profiling “gender, race, ethnicity, and age.”

Following inquiries by journalists, Hikvision removed references to both firms from its website. The company said that the listed technologies had never been sold in the United Kingdom. The document merely described the “potential applications of cameras with features developed by partners,” they added.

FaiceTech denied any cooperation with Hikvision. The company said that the brochure was created and published without its knowledge or consent.

The marketing materials were first uncovered by the rights group Big Brother Watch.

“It is deeply troubling that the same racist technology used in Xinjiang to suppress the Uyghur population is being sold in the United Kingdom. Hikvision is normalising extremely intrusive surveillance capabilities that have no place in a democracy,” said Madeleine Stone, the group’s legal and political affairs officer.

She says the government should ban this technology.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Commerce accused Hikvision of involvement in human rights abuses during the Chinese crackdown on Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities. The department added the firm to the sanctions list.

Hikvision acknowledged that its devices could have been used in “re-education camps.” In 2019 the company sold at least one camera model with race-recognition features.

Unlike in the United States, cameras from the Chinese manufacturer are widespread in the United Kingdom. In November 2022 the government announced its intention to запретить use Hikvision and Dahua devices in the public sector.

The company said it had not sold equipment directly in the United Kingdom. Distribution of its products in the country is handled by distributors and integrators:

“Hikvision has never knowingly or deliberately violated human rights, […] and it never will do so in the future.”

As a reminder, in July 2021 the U.S. government imposed sanctions on Chinese AI companies for violations of Muslim minority rights.

In May, a programmer-engineer from China described testing of an emotion-recognition system on Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s police stations.

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