VCG via Getty Images
Huawei has been keeping its head down through the furore of the U.S. election. Speculation as to how the tech giant’s punishment at the hands of Trump might change under Biden remains just that—speculation. The last thing it needed were stunning new headlines linking the company to China’s surveillance state, and so this week’s Washington Post story outing its deployment of facial recognition to “recognize Uighur minorities” was devastating.
The new report, which has “sparked concerns that the software could help fuel China’s crackdown on the mostly Muslim minority group,” risks being especially damaging to Huawei’s consumer business. Huawei, for a time the world’s largest smartphone maker this year, still outsells Apple despite crushing U.S. sanctions. Absent those restrictions, it would have taken Samsung’s crown for global sales on more than a temporary basis by now.
Huawei claims 600 million smartphone users—even with most of those in China and international users churning to other brands, it has likely retained between 100 and 200 million across key export markets. In reality, very few of those users have switched from Huawei because of U.S. allegations of Chinese state influence and control, although millions have already switched because of the loss of Google.
Huawei is countering with alternatives to full-fat Android and Google’s apps and services, with some 400 million monthly users across 170 countries for at least some of those services already secured. But where those users are outside China, the risk for Huawei is that they are more likely to be swayed by accusations of racial surveillance and alerts than 5G network cybersecurity warnings.
MORE FOR YOU
All that said, there are no real surprises in this new report. We know Huawei technology has been deployed by the authorities in China’s Xinjiang region, part of the surveillance machine used to subjugate its Muslim population under the pretence of counterterrorism. I first reported on Huawei’s links to Xinjiang back in April 2019, covering various agreements signed with Xinjiang’s authorities in 2018. Then last year, I reported on the release of the “China Cables” and claims by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute that “Huawei’s work in Xinjiang is extensive and includes working directly with the Chinese Government’s public security bureaus in the region.”
This latest Washington Post story, based on a document unearthed by researchers at IPVM, is more of the same, showing that in 2018 Huawei worked with Megvii “to test an AI camera system that could scan faces in a crowd and estimate each person’s age, sex and ethnicity.” Clearly surveillance is surveillance, but the emotive use of AI-based facial recognition to detect ethnicity will raise bigger concerns, albeit we have seen stories on such technologies in Xinjiang before. If this particular system “detected the face of a member of the mostly Muslim minority group, the test report said, it could trigger a ‘Uighur alarm’.”
Last year, Huawei told me that the company “reaffirms that its technology—which is general purpose and based on global standards, complies with all applicable laws where it is sold. Huawei does not operate safe city networks on behalf of any customers.” As I pointed out at the time, adhering to the applicable laws in Xinjiang is an embarrassingly empty defense.
This time around, a Huawei spokesperson told the Post that this “is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications.” Huawei has since said that “we take the allegations in the Washington Post’s article very seriously and are investigating the issues raised within.” For its part, Megvii says that “the company’s systems are not designed to target or label ethnic groups.”
No surprises either in the use of facial recognition type technologies for this kind of dystopian purpose—we’ve seen those stories before as well. China is an unchecked surveillance laboratory for its technology players—be they global leaders in the supply of security cameras or the AI unicorns that have been fuelled by billions from China and western fund managers, keen to tap into the fast growth that China’s closed market and untampered enthusiasm for monitoring and control brings.
The irony with Huawei and Xinyang, is that its involvement figured surprisingly late in U.S. claims against the company. Even as other Chinese tech companies were being sanctioned for their own involvement in surveillance schemes targeting Uighurs, allegations against Huawei stuck to cybersecurity risks and alleged state control. Little had been written about its surveillance work. That has now changed, and, unlike the cybersecurity accusations, it is much, much harder to defend and deny.
But there’s a critical angle to this story that passes by unnoticed. Huawei doesn’t want to be peddling its technology to the authorities in Xinjiang. There’s very little money in it—unlike for China’s leading surveillance equipment manufacturers, certainly not enough to justify the dire publicity when news of its involvement leaks out. Consumer products drive Huawei’s growth and profitability, followed by 5G equipment. Huawei’s international business hangs in the balance—5G contracts under threat, U.S. sanctions cutting supply chains for phones and 5G equipment, its CFO still facing the threat of extradition to the U.S. The company doesn’t need any more stresses on its profit centers from these modestly-sized surveillance programs.
Huawei’s obvious move is to back away from Xinjiang, to withdraw its technologies from sale in the region, whether directly or through partners. But it cannot. For China’s best known tech giant to publicly distance itself from Xinjiang would contradict all Beijing’s claims about its security in the region. The government would likely be furious, and Huawei cannot run that risk, certainly not while it is heavily reliant on the support of the state in its political battles with the U.S. and the safe revenues from China’s 5G and other smart city investments.
And so, Huawei’s PR team needs to absorb another Xinjiang story that plays horribly in the West, risking a consumer backlash from all those smartphone users already reeling from the loss of Google and the potential lack of future flagships sporting the latest chipsets. Buying a phone from a company the Trump administration has gone into battle against is one thing, but where there are allegations of involvement in surveillance programs condemned on human rights grounds, that’s very different.
This story encapsulates the issues with China’s technologies and huge investments in its AI machine that will persist beyond the very public wrangling with the Trump administration. The threat to Huawei is that in Europe and elsewhere, critics are shifting from unprovable cyber allegations to this more emotive surveillance landscape, where it is harder for governments to defend their use of Huawei tech.
All of which goes to the potential damage this new report can create, which will play in the media to the very consumers Huawei needs to retain. When Barcelona soccer star Antoine Griezmann cuts his Huawei sponsorship “over Uighur Muslim identification reports,” you clearly have a spiralling problem. The argument for those millions of Huawei smartphone users to switch phones is as stark as it is simple. If the West doesn’t send a message to Chinese technology companies around participation in the more offensive elements of the country’s surveillance state, that’s a huge missed opportunity to try to effect change.
For its part, Huawei remains caught in a trap. It can’t turn its back on Beijing and exit Xinjiang, but nor can it ignore the emotive response elsewhere. The irony, though, is that the more U.S. sanctions bite, the more Huawei needs China’s support and the less likely it is to do the right thing in Xinjiang and risk provoking Beijing’s ire. In the wake of the U.S. blacklist, government and consumer sales in China have sustained Huawei as its export business has declined. So, don’t expect to see any changes anytime soon.
—
Disclosure: My company Digital Barriers develops AI-based analytics and surveillance technologies, including facial recognition. This technology is not sold in China, but the company does compete from time to time with China's surveillance companies in other countries around the world.
The Link LonkDecember 13, 2020 at 05:30PM
https://ift.tt/37eddzd
Huawei Just Gave You A Stunning New Reason To Switch Phones - Forbes
https://ift.tt/3eIwkCL
Huawei
No comments:
Post a Comment