Home Depot and Best Buy have removed Chinese surveillance technology products from their shelves. Both US retail giants have stopped selling Lorex and Ezviz, while Lowe’s is no longer selling the former.
Lorex is a subsidiary of Dahua Technology, while Ezviz is a video surveillance technology brand owned by Hikvision. As TechCrunch explains, in 2019, the US government put Dahua and Hikvision on its economic blacklist for their role in mass surveillance of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times published a report detailing how facial recognition software developed by Dahua, the owner of Lorex, was being sold to law enforcement as a way to identify Uyghurs. Meanwhile, Hikvision cameras have been installed in mosques and detention camps in Xinjiang, according to a 2019 New York Times report.
It’s unclear why the retail giants have decided to recall Lorex and Ezviz products right now, but consumers have been free to purchase these security cameras for the past several years after their parent companies were placed on the US economic blacklist.
