• A brochure advertising racial profiling capabilities has caused more problems for Hikvision.
• The firm is also in hot water after advertising that its products could be used in conjunction with facial recognition tech.
• The company that makes said tech has had to send a legal letter to put an end to the potentially misleading association.

Chinese-made surveillance cameras will find no home in the UK, and if there was hope this would change, that hope is now shattered.

At the weekend The Guardian reported on a matter involving Hikvision, whereby the brand advertised a range of features in collaboration with a UK-based startup known as FaiceTech. FaiceTech bills itself as “one of Europe’s leading facial recognition solutions” and this prompted concerns.

These concerns related to Hikvision and allegations that the firm was involved in repression and mistreatment of Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China. This firm has in the past acknowledged its products were used in re-education camps. Worse still, Hikvision was found to have marketed at least one security camera as featuring the ability to automatically profile somebody based on “racial attributes”.

Bizarrely, however, FaiceTech says that is has never collaborated with Hikvision. The startup went so far as to send Hikvision a legal letter demanding a brochure advertising that the manufacturers cameras and technology from the likes of FaiceTech could be used together. This, Faicetech said, had the potential to deceive the public and mistakenly associate the two brands.

This brochure was spotted by activist group Big Brother Watch.

“It is deeply alarming that the same racist technology being used in Xinjiang to repress the Uyghur population is being marketed in Britain. Hikvision is normalising deeply intrusive surveillance capacities which have no place in a democracy,” the group’s legal and policy officer, Madeleine Stone, said in a statement to The Guardian.

“Hikvision’s surveillance products pose a real threat to rights and security. The government must act now to ban this rights-abusing technology,” Stone added.

The surveillance camera maker has said that the brochures in question only served to show potential applications for its cameras and that this functionality wasn’t advertised in the UK. The fact that the company advertises this technology is cause for concern, expect seemingly within China.

“Hikvision has never knowingly or intentionally committed human rights abuses itself or acted in wilful disregard and will never do so in the future,” the firm said in a statement.

This is just the latest problem for a Chinese based camera maker. Back in November, the UK government moved to ban security cameras made in China from its government institutions.

“The review has concluded that, in light of the threat to the UK and the increasing capability and connectivity of these systems, additional controls are required,” Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Oliver Dowden said at the time.

“Government will continue to keep this risk under review and will take further steps if and when they become necessary,” he concluded.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]