Hikvision says it began phasing out an automatic minority recognition feature in 2018, but declined to clarify status of their Uyghur recognition analytics
Charles Rollet / IPVM : Tweets: @charlesrollet1 , @skjeldtoft , and @charlesrollet1 Tweets: Charles Rollet / @charlesrollet1 : Hikvision - the world's largest security camera maker - admits its cameras once had AI that could automatically recognize minorities. It now says the function “was removed in a firmware update and it is no longer available in current products” https://ipvm.com/... via @ipvideo Sebastian Kjeldtoft / @skjeldtoft : “Hikvision's statement to @politiken is the first instance of the company directly addressing the minority recognition issue and acknowledging its involvement” https://twitter.com/... Charles Rollet / @charlesrollet1 : Hikvision said its software “was not focused on any single ethnic group”. There are some problems with this claim, though, notably that the company once touted an AI camera capable of automatically determining whether someone was Uyghur https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This statement is Hikvision's first direct acknowledgment of the minority-recognition capability that IPVM's Charles Rollet has been pressing it on — per Sebastian Kjeldtoft's readout to Politiken, the company now concedes the feature shipped and was pulled by firmware update starting in 2018. It matters because Hikvision is not a niche vendor: the world's largest camera maker, 42%-owned by the Chinese state, with its gear already installed at sensitive sites abroad.
The acknowledgment lands mid-arc rather than closing one. The same outlet's reporting later escalated into what Wired described as a new front in the US-China tech war ([[a:838741]]), and the refusal here to clarify the Uyghur analytics keeps the core question — whether the capability persists in other forms — open even as the headline feature is declared gone.
First-order effects
- Hikvision now carries an on-the-record admission that its cameras once recognized minorities automatically, converting an allegation it could dispute into documented history — while its refusal to clarify the Uyghur analytics leaves Western buyers and regulators without a clean bill of health.
Second-order effects
- The admission hands ammunition to governments already weighing restrictions: the UK's directive telling departments to stop installing Chinese cameras at sensitive sites ([[a:985242]]) rests on exactly this kind of unresolved-capability question.
Third-order effects
- If the vendor playbook is 'remove the feature by firmware, decline to audit the rest,' procurement regimes will keep hardening around verification rather than promises — pushing Hikvision, Dahua, and peers toward separate domestic and export tracks, the path later visible when Hikvision terminated five Xinjiang local-government contracts ([[a:880356]]) and Dahua announced similar exits ([[a:880680]]).
The trend: Surveillance vendors are being forced onto a two-track existence, where state-linked capabilities tolerated at home become disqualifying in export markets unless independently verifiable.