Why one of China’s largest facial recognition companies faces a US ban

Megvii might be the next target for the Trump administration

Reading Time:3 minutes

Megvii’s tech is being used in various products, including smartphones from Xiaomi, Vivo and Lenovo. (Picture: Simon Song/SCMP)

Published: 9:16pm, 30 May 2019Updated: 9:05am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Update (June 17th, 2019): After we published our story, Human Rights Watch clarified Face++'s relationship with IJOP. We've extensively reworked the story to reflect their correction. Separately, Alipay clarified that it no longer uses Face++ in its payment app.

Verifying your identity through facial recognition to unlock phones, make payments and authenticate bank transactions has become so mainstream we rarely think about the companies behind the tech. Chinese AI startup Megvii has become the world’s biggest provider of these services, but now it might find itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

Reports say Megvii is one of a number of Chinese companies involved in surveillance tech that may go on a US blacklist, joining Huawei on a list that would bar US companies from dealing with them without approval. Huawei was placed on the list earlier this month, with the US citing national security concerns and alleging Huawei violated sanctions on Iran.

In this case, Bloomberg suggests it's due to the US government's concern over human rights abuses in Xinjiang region, home to the Uygur Muslim minority. The New York Times says technology from Megvii, among others like CloudWalk, SenseTime and Yitu, is used in software for surveillance in the far western region of China. The latter report says it reviewed a database generated by Yitu software that attempts to identify Uygurs through facial recognition.

Those reports appeared to be bolstered by Human Rights Watch, which initially issued a report saying that Megvii's Face++ code was found in an app called IJOP, which is used to log the supposed suspicious behavior of members of China’s Uygur Muslim minority. (In this case, suspicious behavior could mean things like avoiding your neighbors, spending too much time abroad and using too much electricity.)