Shanghai launches new Uyghur Ethnicity detection

While PRC China authorities and companies have denied Uyghur detection or claimed that it stopped, a project just implemented in Tier 1 megacity Shanghai's business district, an area with nearly no Uyghurs, has implemented Uyghur detection across thousands of cameras, IPVM has verified from the project's documents

In this report, we examine how 14 police stations in central Shanghai are now equipped with Uyghur detection to target their investigations, track down unknown Uyghurs, and receive alerts on suspected Uyghur activity.

This is the second in a series of IPVM reports on Shanghai's newly expanding mass surveillance infrastructure.

Under a sweeping facial recognition expansion launched in late 2023, Shanghai's Xuhui District public security branch expects to capture 25.9 million faces daily.

Each provides a timestamped snapshot of a person's location, companions, and activities, which is matched to and stored in one of 50+ million individual files in Shanghai's municipal database.

It specifically detects "Uyghur ethnicity" based on a person's facial features, which is the only ethnicity or race mentioned.

This results, known as "structured data," are stored with corresponding images for retrieval by police and "big data" analysis.