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China’s facial-recognition systems crunch data from cameras to monitor citizens
- IshKebab 9y agoMmm pretty sure every government is doing this. It's just more public in China due to lack of data protection laws.
- blackbagboys 9y agoThis sort of absolutely false equivalence only serves to strengthen the complacency of those of us who live in societies that retain greater degrees of freedom.
- srean 9y agoCould you elaborate a bit on the false equivalence. Depending on what you mean I may or may not disagree.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- paradite 9y agoHN Rule #1: Don't speak in favor of China in the area of privacy, freedom of speech and surveillance.
- knowaveragejoe 9y agoA more apt criticism would be against the use of whataboutism and false equivalencies in the above post.
- hammock 9y agoPassing thru the immigration checkpoint in Shanghai and having a kiosk take my photo without warning, and respond with a dystopian smiley face and shutter sound, was one of the more creepy things to happen to me.
- likelynew 9y agoDoesn't every airport has CCTV recording of every corner? China may be monitoring much more, but being taken a photo inside airport does not sound intrusive to me.
- hammock 9y agoI'm sure some sort of facial recognition is being used at many airports thru CCTV. Walking up to a kiosk that doesn't look like a camera, and having my photo snapped with a smile, while I was simply looking around for where to scan my boarding pass by my face accidentally lined up with the camera, is what creeped me out. Hard to describe, not sure if that makes sense.
- leemailll 9y agoI'd like to know which country's airport won't take a photo at such check point
- captainmuon 9y agoYes! Recently had the same experience at that airport. It's not so much the fact of taking the picture that disturbed me - I fully expected to be catalogued, and filmed, in 1) an international airport and 2) in China. OK, if I had my way with society, we wouldn't be doing that, but that's the status quo right now and I can deal with it. It's that I felt I was being tricked into it. Having your biometric picture taken and saved is somewhat intimate, I want to at least mentally prepare myself and pose for the camera. It's mainly an emotional problem. It is just a bit short shoving somebody into a foto booth. My personal opinion is that China is often quite tone-deaf when it comes to being dystopian and creepy. The actual security practices are not too different from what we have in the west, but the way they present them make them seem like from a bad movie.
- baybal2 9y agoArticle SHENZHEN—Gan Liping pumped her bike across a busy street, racing to beat a crossing light before it turned red. She didn’t make it. Immediately, her face popped up on two video screens above the street. “Jaywalkers will be captured using facial-recognition technology,” the screens said. Facial-recognition technology, once a specter of dystopian science fiction, is becoming a feature of daily life in China, where authorities are using it on streets, in subway stations, at airports and at border crossings in a vast experiment in social engineering. Their goal: to influence behavior and identify lawbreakers. Ms. Gan, 31 years old, had been caught on camera crossing illegally here once before, allowing the system to match her two images. Text displayed on the crosswalk screens identified her as a repeat offender. “I won’t ever run a red light again,” she said.
- stuaxo 9y agoWhat does it do to people - once you internalise that much compliance ?
- hellbanner 9y agoIt's been happening for a while, and the frogs in the pot will get used to this too. "It's for the greater good"
- natch 9y agoIt makes them build their lives around the assumption that only activities that everyone else seems to be doing, are safe to do. You could say that in more (relatively) free societies it is also this way. But no. In China the default position is "everything is forbidden unless explicitly permitted" whereas in the US for example this is flipped to the near opposite position, "everything is permitted unless it involves doing something forbidden."
- kronos29296 9y ago1984 is happening in China. Sounds horrible. Happy I am not there. (Big Brother is watching you)
- loudmax 9y ago
- bmcusick 9y agoNon-Chinese shouldn't kid ourselves. Our governments want to do this too, and probably will. Drones with gigapixel cameras hovering over metro regions. Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.
- dx034 9y agoBut probably not openly, at least not for a while. Can't imagine that the US or a European country could display the faces of jaywalkers on the street without large scale protest (especially since this is not really considered a crime).
- crpatino 9y agoThere... > (especially since this is not really considered a crime) The seed is already planted: it is ok to display the face of a citizen, as long as he's a criminal. No debate about what kinds of public need does supersede the privacy rights of the individual citizen, or what kind of crimes would justify this kind of behavior from the part of the government. It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays. All they have to do now is to lower (or I'd say, keep lowering) the threshold; jaywalking is right around the corner.
- noscopeheadshot 9y agoIn reality, it doesn't even require that one be a criminal, merely a suspect.
- zo1 9y ago>"It is all "rulebreakers brought this on themselves" nowadays." Whether you display them publicly or not, if they broke the law, they should be punished. We can't live in some magical limbo situation where we simultaneously have laws and not enforce them most of the time. I.e.: If the tech is there to apply the laws that have currently been "agreed" by the public, then there should be no question or overriding factors to consider. Talk of privacy and "individual rights" is just distracting fluff in that context. We've already decided that certain actions merit punishment. We're just now upset that the coming omnipotent presence of surveillance can actually make us adhere to the things we've been whacking other people over the head with. You know, the ones that "got caught" doing it. Either that, or simply start repealing all these non-sense laws that we don't actually want to punish people for. The third alternative is a gigantic mess of exceptions and "buts" that want to enable us to eat our surveillance cake, and sometimes keep it. Make no mistake, that is exactly what the "privacy" folks are advocating for. More bureaucracy.
- thablackbull 9y agoThis has been reported and going on for a while. * MIT Technology review has a story on this [1] * Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2] * JD (i.e., the competitor of Alibaba which is somewhat analogous to Amazon here) You can pay for deliveries using facial recognition [3] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-paying-with-your-face/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-te... [2] http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china-debut http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china-debut [3] https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce-company-jd-jd-just-used-a-robot-to-deliver-packages/ https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce-compa...
- jstanley 9y ago> * Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2] Not just China. Police in Wales (UK) are already using facial recognition systems[1] and have in fact already arrested at least one person because of it, just this month[2]. [1] https://www.south-wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/introduction-of-facial-recognition-into-south-wales-police/ https://www.south-wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/introduction-o... [2] https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police-automatic-face-recognition/ https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police-automat...
- lettergram 9y agoInteresting, I think I saw this same exact example at GTC 2016. Although, on a quick search on mobile - I can't find the talk... It was a Chinese company discussing their surveillance in major cities and their use of GPUs for their form of video compression. With the specific goal of keeping the data as small as possible. It was the most dystopian talk I've ever been at, and the presentors were all smiles and laughs. I honestly question how well it works at scale with hundreds of millions of faces at different angles. I asked them about this, and they said it won't be long now to fix. Their explanation was they only need one accurate view of their face to tag those people. Then they just track them where ever they go.
- gonzerelli 9y agoNot just that, but everyone has a unique way they walk, called their gait, so if you are identified once (usually by facial recognition) your gait can be used to identify you forever after, even if you try to hide your identity. Only way to go undetected then is to purposely change your gait and other things, but the important thing here is: We are at a point where the effort you have to go through to remain anonymous in the public is so high that it may not be worth the effort.
- sangnoir 9y agoA few years back,I read about Chinese research on gait analysis via floor tiles that can uniquely identify you by calculations on weight and shear forces as you walk over them. I thought it was evil, but brilliant, out-of-the box thinking.
- verroq 9y agoNo doubt that once voice recognition, speech to text and NLP advances enough you'd have public safety microphones always looking out for counter-revolutionary speech and terrorist activity. 1984 is fantasy because the telescreens couldn't scale with a human listener. Worry not, deep learning will bridge the gap. What a disaster!
- donald123 9y agoAnybody can take photos or videos in public area, so does the government. If you are so paranoid about your privacy, stay at home, order online, simple as that.
- logfromblammo 9y agoIf you are paranoid and a good make-up artist, there's CV Dazzle. If you are paranoid and not a good make-up artist, you may have to settle for glasses and clothing with integrated LEDs designed to confuse known recognition algorithms. Or maybe just start wearing masks and veils in public.
- newtem0 9y agoThe machines will be able to id you by height, limb proportions, cadence and hundreds of other things that cannot be concealed within reason.
- logfromblammo 9y agoYes, but they don't make a record of your gait at the DMV and print it on your official ID card, do they? They might be able to track John/Jane Doe #1 across a plaza, and maybe match that up across multiple cameras, but without a reference database connecting gaits to public identities, there is a possibility that without reasonable suspicion, the data for John/Jane Doe #1 would have to be purged before it could be linked to you. Of course, a state-level actor that chooses not to obey the law could retain those data indefinitely, and eventually identify you via statistical analyses. If you don't want that to happen, you will need to get politically active and make public oversight of agencies that perform surveillance of the public an issue. Otherwise, you might have to wear specialized clothing and shoes that change heel height and sole shape as you walk.
- idealhavoc 9y agoThe government worries me more than people/companies for two reasons: 1) The government can track me everywhere with cameras anywhere they want in public; companies would be mostly restricted to when I walk past their franchises in most cases (drones could be an issue, but cross that bridge when we get to it) 2) The government agencies have motivation and a history of suppressing new or bothersome political parties which challenge their budgets. Ether by spreading dirt gathered via other activities or jailing activists such things are at least substantially harder for a company to accomplish.
- Jonnax 9y agoWas going through a UK airport and noticed they had some cameras with a silly looking LED light on them so I googled the manufacturer: http://www.hrsid.com/product-mflow#queue http://www.hrsid.com/product-mflow#queue They supply facial recognition hardware/software that can track you across your journey in an airport accurately. It's not a huge leap to get it over an entire CCTV network.
- jloughry 9y agoThe silly looking swirly light is intended to attract attention so that people will look directly into the camera. [Seriously. I found it in a technical description.] That's evil.
- cryoshon 9y agowelcome to having even less ability to resist the government
- ausjke 9y agowhile 90% of this is really bad to everyone(privacy, oppression,etc), I see there is a small bright side , that the criminals can now be caught so quickly these days there from some news I read. the videos are all connected and facials are recognized quickly(a few seconds for millions of faces), they tracked down criminals(and their cars) who was on the run for thousands of miles all the way, in less than 24 hours sometimes. I think the whole project was called something like "peaceful city project". in US, where surveillance cameras are scarce to find in most public areas, you need eye witness all the time, many cases take years to resolve, if at all.
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoYeah, 'criminals' are caught quickly when they harm an important businessman's mistresses' niece and it makes a good cctv news blurb. Not so much otherwise
- newtem0 9y agoWhat is the story behind your screen name?
- zabana 9y agoThis is all well and good but you miss the part where it's the government that officially defines what a "criminal" or a "potential terrorist" is.
- pavement 9y agoBasically, in the future, we're all stone-faced automatons, helplessly clawing at the walls of a social cage that demands our thoughts must be at least neutral and aloof, if not explicitly happy and positive.
- zabana 9y agoAs if western governments were not already looking into this, (heck they''ve probably already implemented such policies for all we know). The only difference is that China is a no BS nation, they are actually (and surprisingly) very open about it. Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is not the story itself but the sheer hypocrisy of the western press / media. I think the time has come for us to take a good look at ourselves in the mirror and accept ourselves for what we actually are.
- deckardsdream 9y agoKeep reading about weird face recognition stuff. Like, this popped up on 4chan yesterday... https://www.kairos.com/diversity-recognition https://www.kairos.com/diversity-recognition
- davidf18 9y agoPerson of Interest TV show also on Netflix http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/ Eagle Eye movie:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/
- gozur88 9y agoThe creepiness factor aside, I'm trying to imagine how you'd implement a system to keep track of 1.3 billion people via face recognition. The hardware demands alone are mind boggling.
- abrkn 9y agoOur only hope is the continued incompetence of the governments purchasing and operating this equipment.