Huawei: Uighur surveillance fears lead PR exec to quit

ONE of Huawei’s European communications chiefs has resigned from the Chinese firm over concerns about its role in the surveillance of Muslim Uighurs.

Tommy Zwicky had served as the firm’s Danish vice-president of communications for six months.

It comes after internal Huawei documents were made public, which mentioned a “Uighur alarm” system that it had worked on with Chinese facial-recognition specialist Megvii in 2018.

Huawei said it opposed discrimination.

“We provide general-purpose connectivity products based on recognised industry standards, and we comply with ethics and governance systems around emerging technology,” it told the BBC.

“We do not develop or sell systems that identify people by their ethnicity, and we do not condone the use of our technologies to discriminate against or oppress members of any community.”

A spokeswoman for Megvii declined to comment, but the firm has previously said its systems are not designed to target or label specific ethnic groups.

It is believed that the Chinese government has detained up to a million Uighurs in Xinjiang province in what the state defines as “re-education camps”.

Beijing has consistently denied mistreatment and says the camps are designed to stamp out terrorism and improve employment opportunities.

Mr Zwicky had previously worked for a Danish newspaper, and before that was editor-in-chief of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.

He officially remains under contract to Huawei until February and is unable to discuss his decision.

However, he confirmed his departure via Twitter and LinkedIn.

His decision comes a week after French football star Antoine Griezmann ended his sponsorship deal with Huawei after raising his own concerns about “strong suspicions” that the company had been involved in developing an alert system to monitor the Uighurs.

American surveillance research firm IPVM brought to light the Chinese-language documents on 8 December.

They were marked as confidential but were being hosted publicly on Huawei’s European website.

The report referenced an “interoperability test [in which] Huawei and Megvii jointly provided a face-recognition solution based on Huawei’s video cloud solution. In the solution, Huawei provided servers, storage, network equipment, its FusionSphere cloud platform, cameras and other software and hardware, [while] Megvii provided its dynamic facial-recognition system software”.

Among the functions of Megvii’s software that the report said Huawei had verified was a “Uighur alert”.

IPVM said a separate box added to Megvii’s software was capable of determining ethnicity as part of its “face attribute analysis”.

The page became inaccessible shortly after the Washington Post asked the firm about its existence.

At the time Huawei said the document had referenced a “test”, which had not seen a real-world application.

But the the Post later published a second article which said Huawei’s site indicated it had worked with four other companies on products advertised to have ethnicity-tracking capabilities.

In response, Huawei promised to carry out a follow-up investigation, but continued to deny it sold systems that identified people by their ethnicity. – bbc.com