Documents link Huawei to China’s surveillance programsThe Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has long brushed off questions about its role in China’s state surveillance, saying it just sells general-purpose networking gear.
A review by The Washington Post of more than 100 Huawei PowerPoint presentations, many marked “confidential,” suggests that the company has had a broader role in tracking China’s populace than it has acknowledged.
These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition.
“Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.”
The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear.
Huawei has long been dogged by criticism that it is opaque and closer to the Chinese government than it claims. A number of Western governments have blocked Huawei gear from their new 5G telecom networks out of concern that the company may assist Beijing with intelligence-gathering, which Huawei denies.
Huawei tested AI software that could recognize Uyghur minorities and alert police, report says
The new details on Huawei’s surveillance products come amid growing concerns in China, and around the world, about the consequences of pervasive facial recognition and other biometric tracking. Even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to rely on such tools to root out dissent and maintain its one-party rule, it has warned against the technologies’ misuse in the private sector.
This autumn, under Beijing’s pressure, Huawei and other tech giants pledged they would not abuse facial recognition and other surveillance tools, as a new law protecting personal data came into effect.
Facebook said in November that it would shut down its facial recognition system and delete facial templates of more than a billion people, citing growing concerns about the technology. Last year, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon announced they would not sell facial recognition software to police until there was federal regulation, and Zoom removed an employee attention-tracking function.............
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/huawei-surveillance-china/
