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A Chinese security camera company is advertising ethnicity recognition features to British and other European customers, as it faces a ban on UK operations over allegations it is involved in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang.
In a brochure published on its website, Hikvision announced several features it said it could offer in collaboration with UK startup FaiceTech.
These include the use of facial recognition for retail security, border controls and anti-money laundering checks for retail banking.
The brochure also advertised “alternative demographic profiling facial analysis algorithms,” including “gender, race/ethnicity, age” profiling. Another, Italian-based, company was also cited as offering racial profiling on Hikvision’s website.
After inquiries from the Guardian, the company removed both claims from its website and said the technology had never been sold in the UK. The document, it said, detailed “potential applications of our cameras with technology developed independently by FaceTech and other partners”.
FaiceTech denied ever working with Hikvision, and said the brochure was created and published without its knowledge or consent. In a legal letter sent to Hikvision, seen by the Guardian, the British company demanded the document be removed because it was “likely to mislead the public into the false belief that our client is in any way associated with Hikvision”.
The brochures were first discovered by campaign group Big Brother Watch. In a statement, Madeleine Stone, the group’s legal and policy officer, said: “It is deeply worrying that the same racist technology used in Xinjiang to suppress the Uyghur population is being sold in Britain. Hikvision is normalizing deeply intrusive surveillance capabilities that have no place in a democracy. .
“Hikvision’s surveillance products pose a real threat to rights and security. Governments must act now to ban technologies that abuse these rights.”
Hikvision was placed on a US trade blacklist in 2019, with the US Commerce Department saying it “involved human rights violations and abuses in implementing China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-tech surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups”. .
The company has acknowledged that its cameras may have been used in the country’s “re-education camps”, and was found in 2019 to market at least one security camera that was “capable of automatically identifying the ethnic characteristics of the analyst’s target … such as Uyghur, Han.” .That marketing document was quickly removed after it was noticed by the media.
Unlike in the US, Hikvision cameras are widely used in Britain, a 2020 Guardian investigation revealed. Public records show it is used in council areas including Kensington and Chelsea, Guildford, Coventry, Chelmsford and Mole Valley.
They were installed in the toilets of a high school in Hunstanton, west Norfolk, and in branches of an upmarket UK gym chain, where the company’s thermal vision products were used as part of the Covid response.
On Wednesday, the UK government suffered a defeat in the House of Lords after it opposed amendments by Hikvision and another Chinese company, Dahua, which would have banned the public sector from buying or using cameras.
The clause, added to the procurement bill by crossbench peer David Elton, requires the government to publish a timeline for removing physical technology or surveillance equipment from the government’s procurement supply chain where there is evidence the provider is involved in modernisation. Slavery, genocide or crimes against humanity.
In a statement, Hikvision said: “We do not comment on ongoing or potential legal proceedings. The brochures in question detail potential applications of our cameras with technology independently developed by FaceTech and other partners.
“Hikvision has never been involved in their development process and plays no role in any potential implementation and use of those solutions. Hikvision does not sell its product directly to the market through distributors and integrators. This particular capability has never been sold by Hikvision in the UK.
“In 2018, a separate recognition function produced by Hikvision, which was not focused on any one ethnic group, was removed by a firmware update and is no longer available, as reported by The New York Times in 2019.
“Hikvision has strictly complied with all applicable laws and regulations in the UK and all countries where we operate to ensure full compliance.
“Hikvision has never knowingly or intentionally violated or willfully neglected human rights and will never do so in the future.”
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