French footballer Antoine Griezmann announced on Thursday that he was “putting an immediate end to [son] partnership ”with Huawei, citing“ strong suspicions ”about the participation of the Chinese telecoms giant in the surveillance of the Uyghur Muslim minority.
“Following strong suspicions that the Huawei company would have contributed to the development of a ‘Uyghur alert’ thanks to facial recognition software, I am announcing that I am putting an immediate end to my partnership linking me to this company”, writes the Barcelona striker, who had a contract as a brand ambassador since 2017. The 2018 world champion calls on “Huawei not to be content with denying these accusations but to take concrete actions as quickly as possible to condemn this repression mass “of the Uyghur minority” and use its influence to contribute to respect for the rights of men and women within society “.
A software for “alerts to the presence of Uyghurs”
Chinese companies have been accused in the past of having implemented facial recognition software to identify people of Uyghur appearance. Again on Tuesday, telecoms giant Huawei was blamed in the United States for being involved in testing such detection software, according to research firm IPVM.
An internal report from the Chinese group (removed from Huawei’s website but still available on the Internet) indicated that this facial recognition software was in the testing phase to provide “alerts to the presence of Uyghurs” and made it possible to recognize “the age, sex, ethnicity ”. The United States-based human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday claimed in a report that Muslims were arrested in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang after being reported by software that identifies suspicious behavior. The Uyghurs are the main ethnic group in Xinjiang, a huge region of China which notably has common borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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