Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Forced Uyghur labour in China: Getting the World attention now

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Syed Ahmed Uzair

Article Title

Forced Uyghur labour in China: Getting the World attention now

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

August 5, 2020

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Mihrigul Tursun, former detainee at Uyghur mass internment camps in China, testifying in Washington

Mihrigul Tursun, former detainee at Uyghur mass internment camps in China, testifying in Washington | Source:    D.A. Peterson via Wikimedia

Since 2017 nearly a million ethnic minorities, mostly Uyghur Muslims from the far Western region of the Xinjiang province of China, have been put in  detention centres. The detainees in these camps are forced to renounce their faith and, in some instances, have been subjected to torture.

The Chinese government has termed the program as a combat against “religious extremism” even as it detains members of ethnic minorities from the region and sends them to the so-called “re-education camps”. The experts however believe that these people have been thrust into a systematic program of cultural genocide.

This campaign now appears to be proceeding towards a new direction wherein the Uyghur detainees are being shipped across the country for forced labour in factories.

As per the government officials, these “trainees” have all “graduated” and are being given employment in the form of factory labour to lead a better life. While China has made this their sole criteria to defend the program, there is mounting evidence that suggests that the Uyghurs are being subjected to forced labour and are not allowed to visit their families in Xinjiang.

According to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Uyghurs have been moved under a labour scheme known as Xinjiang aid to factories across the country straight from the detention centers. Many of these factories are a part of the supply chain network for well-renowned brands such as Apple, Nike, and Dell.

At the factories the workers are forced to live in separate rooms and are required to take Mandarin lessons under heavy surveillance. They are not allowed to leave their jobs and go back to their families in Xinjiang either.

John Oliver, host of popular US TV show “Last Week Tonight” recently aired an episode wherein he talked about the Uyghurs. “If this is the first time that you’re hearing about an estimated million people who’ve been held in detention camps – mostly Uighurs but also Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities – you are not alone. And it’s probably because China has done its level best to keep this story from getting out,” says Oliver.

John Oliver further said, “While there is clearly nothing new about horrific practices being hidden deep within the supply chain of global capitalism, what is happening to the Uighurs is particularly appalling”.

Despite China’s attempts at keeping the entire crackdown private, more and more horrifying details have come out in the open about the atrocities meted out to the Uyghurs via testimonies from former detainees.

This has led to an increased pressure on China as well as the big brands utilizing the Chinese supply chain network, to cut ties with factories where human rights are being violated under this Uyghur crackdown.

The US has restricted 11 Chinese companies from buying American goods due to claims of them being linked to the Xinjiang region. A coalition of over 180 organizations also called out dozens of clothing brands and retailers for links to the Xinjiang crackdown and forced Uyghur labour.

While some companies like PVH, the owner of brands like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger are working on reducing their presence in the Xinjiang region’s supply chain network others like Big W, a discount department store chain operated by Australia's Woolworths group acknowledged that some of their products might be unintentionally coming from the regions of Xinjiang province.

Companies like Nike, Puma, and Adidas have however continued to deny allegations of links to factories with forced Uyghur labour completely. In their statement Nike said, "We have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region."

With the increasing spotlight on the Chinese government’s repressive activities,  international pressure is increasing on the business groups which depend on China for supply change, to come clean on any link of their vendors with Uyghur forced labour. There might be some hope, even if very little, for the plight of the Chinese Uyghurs after all.

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February 22, 2021 11:06 PM

WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications

According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”

This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.

Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.

To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.

However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.

It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’

A person using WhatsApp | Source: Andrés Rodríguez via Pixabay

By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.

The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…

Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:

“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.

They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.

They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”

Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives.  When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.

In WhatsApp’s words:

“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”

In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.

Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.

Gen. Michael Hayden | Source: Wikimedia

Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”

In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.

In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.

In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.

Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.

Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.

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