For Shazeda Ahmed, a visiting researcher at New York University’s AI Now Institute who contributed to the Article 19 report, these are all “terrible reasons”.
“That Chinese conceptions of race are going to be built into technology and exported to other parts of the world is really troubling, particularly since there isn’t the kind of critical discourse [about racism and ethnicity in China] that we’re having in the United States,” she tells the Guardian.
“If anything, research and investigative reporting over the last few years have shown that sensitive personal information is particularly dangerous when in the hands of state entities, especially given the wide ambit of their possible use by state actors.”