United States may place Hikvision, the world’s largest video surveillance manufacturer, on the Specially Designated National (SDN) list. If enacted, this would be a historical development in US-China relations, an IPVM Report says.
Hikvision also provides surveillance technology in Xinjiang in mosques and concentration camps, and its operations have expanded considerably since 2017.
In 2018, Hikvision inadvertently exhibited ‘ethnic minority’ detection technology at the AI Cloud World Summit. The demonstration did not specify which the ethnic minority was, but ‘ethnic minority’ typically refers to Uyghurs in the context of PRC surveillance, IPVM says.
Evidence indicates that Hikvision created Uyghur face detection at the direction of PRC officials and with full knowledge that authorities would use the technology against Uyghurs.