The interesting part is not the story itself, but that they chose to demo it to the BBC. Marketing at its best, they want everyone to be fully aware of their capabilities. Wouldn't be surprised if they were overstated, so as to keep citizens in check. The BBC willingly plays along and does not even question the capabilities either way.
There's such a funny mismatch of culture and display of poor international PR sense too.
Based on some cursory search, it looks like it's another one of those local-government-pioneered pilot/experiments [1] like the credit score (except there are dozens of cities in that pilot).
The second tier city local government, trying to tout their achievements at the national level, then goes on a PR spree [2] (probably to earn points for the local party secretary). They even proudly market it as "Guiyang has 'Skynet' everywhere. No matter where you go, there are eyes on you,". I can totally visualize the locals thinking, who wouldn't think this is cool and an indication of Guiyang finally being ready to join the ranks of the civilized world.
Meanwhile, nobody at the local level thinks (or has enough international context to know) that this is a huge negative rather than an achievement from the western perspective. They probably can't even wrap their heads around why wouldn't everyone want this. Smelling the big story, in goes the BBC also, presenting this story as this state of the iron curtain, straight as constructed from Xi's directives.
The 2 sides of the story are just living in very different worlds.
> this is a huge negative rather than an achievement from the western perspective.
To you and I, yes, but I don't think we can take for granted that everyone or even a majority of the West thinks that way these days. Especially if you told them it was to be used for immigration control.
oh ya, for sake of brevity, that was totally a coastal HN crowd facing message. I'm sure people living in Chicago where 40-60 people are being shot each weekend has a different perspective.
I'm trying to work out whether there's a constituency who's in favour of mass surveillance but not gun control, and what that landscape looks like.
Given the prohibition on building a database of gun owners, I wonder if we'll end up with a situation where everyone's face is recorded but the guns are blurred out to protect their rights.
No, they should run it, but they should discuss why the Chinese side chose to demo it, and why they appear proud of it. They should also discuss the limitations.
> The BBC willingly plays along and does not even question the capabilities either way.
They've got a lot of experience doing this since the conservative government started applying it's will to the BBC after choosing the board of directors. Ther'es no longer a sense of "balanced" and "unbiased" news and it's glaringly obvious just by watching their news for a few weeks.
Odd isn't it? I watch their news for more than a few weeks and for the most part find it both balanced and unbiased. I think there were legitimate gripes about its coverage surrounding the Scottish devolution debate, but other than that - it's very good.
It's an old trope, but the concept that everyone thinks that the BBC is biased (against their point of view, naturally) is probably a pretty good indicator of their neutrality.
I would say that there was probably a case that the BBC News coverage leaned against the independence cause. (I speak as someone who wanted Scotland to stay in the Union).
I would say in partial mitigation that the one bias the BBC probably does have is a bias towards the status quo.
> Marketing at its best, they want everyone to be fully aware of
> their capabilities. Wouldn't be surprised if they were
> overstated, so as to keep citizens in check.
The marketing is aimed at foreign countries who might buy the technology.
If some government buys this technology, they better demand full code -and data- disclosure, including any hardware design and firmware, because adding exceptions to skip certain individuals (spies?) or use it as a surveillance network that phones home local images hidden in updates would be less than trivial.
The BBC is one of very few respected foreign news outlets that is not routinely blocked by the GFW. They generally have a more China-friendly stance than US news media.
The BBC is blocked all (it is blocked right now because of the Hong Kong protest/riot happening at the moment) the time and its live news feed is also cut off regularly in the middle of stories.
That being said it is trusted a lot more than CCN & Foxnews which are the other two news sources that are on cable TV (neither are blocked at the moment).
I wouldn't really say that the BBC has a China-friendly stance. I would say that it tries to be more objective most of the time (which I agree with when compared to CCN & Fox News).
I was comparing more with the NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, all of which have broken major stories that were critical of Beijing. I haven't seen as much of that from the BBC. Fox I consider mainly to provide domestic entertainment, so whatever China bias they have wouldn't be that relevant.
It sure would be interesting to someday learn about how all these decisions of what to block get made.
The BBC has been blocked by the GFW since around mid-2018 when they migrated to HTTPS. The Chinese censors could no longer snoop on or selectively block the traffic.
Ah, thanks, I should probably have checked the current situation before repeating what I remember.
Random thought: it would be interesting to compare news services that are and aren't blocked and see if the ones that haven't been blocked yet tend to be more positive on Beijing in their coverage.
You can bet they only demo things if they are 100% sure it will work (in a very controlled environment not unlike North Korean "tours"), and even then often it will fail because of Soviet-style bureaucratic incompetence.
I also demo only things, I am sure 100% it will work. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Every YouTube technical demo is repeated hundred times until perfect video is made to make an impression, it works 100%. That’s the purpose of demoing something. About bureaucratic incompetence I have no opinion.
I heard rumors, that Russian KBG had always eyes on all high levels foreigners in the country. All of them were observed expecting to find something interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat Why should China do it differently? BBC journalist is highly valued target for sure. And there you get bonus points for using this information to showcase facial recognition system in 7 minutes.
First of all it is KGB, and secondly Kompromat is just russian word for blackmail, and I am pretty sure nowadays FSB and any other self-respecting agencies in other countries always keep and eye on influential, wealthy or otherwise having political impact people in their country, that is just national security basics really.
You have to understand that Chinese prefer security over freedom. They support this kind of measures since majority of them probably won't be bothered by it their whole lives, as their typical response: if you don't illegal things, what's to fear for.
And the state media has been touting for years that China is the safest country on earth that "you can buy skewers at midnight", that America is the example of a failed society.
They mostly likely are sincerely and proudly presenting this as a superiority over the tumultuous west.
>You have to understand that Chinese prefer security over freedom.
Pretty much everyone prefers security over freedom in particular in the abscene of security, but also just in general. Take a look at countries that have freedom written on their flags and then count the CCTV cameras in London or the number of three letter agencies in the US.
The only difference is the fact that in China the role of the state in exercising this surveillance is out in the open and endorsed as a means of organising society and everywhere else it happens through the backdoor.
Not sure one can easily speak about 1 billion people, speaking different languages, having different religion, living in different climates, as « prefering security over freedom ».
The chineese i’ve spoken to, that actually lived in china, first told you the official point of view, and then after the conversation kept going on, told you about things they didn’t like, then after some more time you realize all they want is leave china and come live in the west.
Ask the ones you've talked with whether they dare to level with their own parents or relatives, most likely they will be scolded as traitors or even be shuned to avoid troubles.
Yes, there will always be outliers, but in the case of China, where conformity is of utmost importance, they really are just absolute minorities in the 1.4B population.
If you've been following the developments of HK protests, a key indicator is that almost all of these "passive dissents" of the CCP you described turned against HKers just like average Chinese, they are bashing HKers and lapping up the info the party gave them.
Do these people love freedom or even democracy, yes, but they are also acting against it in the case of HK. This is the paradox, they love the "good aspects" of freedom and democracy but they also vehemently hate and reject the "bad ones" that inevitably come with it.
It's the tradeoff between democracy and nationalism. I bet if you offered the typical mainlander the following choices.
1. Democracy + Developed country standard of living, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Xinjiang, Tibet vote to become independent and do become independent countries.
2. Autocracy + Developing country standard of living, but mainland China unifies with Taiwan.
Then most mainlanders would pick the second option. Due to historical reasons, any scenario that risks tarnishing the borders of the idealized unified China incurs a hyperallergic reaction.
When asked, over 50% of Hong Kong people identified as “Hongkonger[s]”, even though various Chinese options were available.¹ Clearly then at least some non-protesters agree.
I suppose so. Though it's much clearer when the matter is dichotomous, such as "going to protest"/"not going", and "GOP"/"Democratic" (I know, I know, but independent is not significant).
As I noted in another comment, a majority of Hong Kong people did not identify themselves as “Chinese” when given the choice.⁰ It is rather implausible to claim that over three million Chinese people are “sponsored by black hands from America and the UK”. Moreover it is quite unlikely that the majority of them are “abject outcasts.” And, finally, as a Marxist, I should like to know in what sense you consider your remarks to be compatible with the compassion for “outcasts” that animated at the very least Marx: “we should not abandon Marxism-Leninism;”¹ “[a]ll Party members must…be firm in their commitment to…the Marxist view on development;”² “[w]e must adhere to Marxism.”³
It's a common dialectic pattern in law enforcement circles world-wide that data at rest that is never touched is data that doesn't exist.
That angle is based on the idea that this data "may as well not exist" but it ignores the many issues with indiscriminate data collection: the data might leak, or management might change and invent undesirable "new" purposes for old data - which, within this theory, then begins to exist retroactively.
Or, rather, the automated systems that store and process the data will increasingly do analysis as well, with humans only viewing the data when prompted to by the system. Technically "the police" can be said not to access the data. In reality it's even worse than if they did, because the automated system , if it works as intended, is much more efficient than humans.
IOW: If it's a violation of civil rights for humans to process some data, then leaving that job to software is just automating civil rights violations.
Right, but I think that's already the next step: the theory of "we're not looking so we don't collect" predates efficient automated large-scale analysis.
It makes sense to me to fight both schemes, but they have different impact, different risk and might need different approaches.
It seems to me law enforcement talks about data collection and analysis as if automated tools didn't have privacy impacts. They often seem to deliberately focus on whether or not a human has access to some specific information, which IMO obfuscates the issue. They're not very willing to acknowledge that there are two schemes, as you call them.
> within this theory, then begins to exist retroactively.
That is evidently what they keep the data for. They want to be able to have the data to access it eventually. If they didn't want to access it eventually, they wouldn't keep it. That is why mass collections, that are stored, are wrong.
I could get behind this idea as a privacy compromise.
The government can collect any data it likes on everything, but any data it then looks at must be published to the world. Ie. The government gets no privacy when looking through its big database.
The simplest approach would be to livestream every screen owned by any government agency.
I interpreted the statement "we don't gather their data" as meaning that they don't have access to the data if they can't justify it operationally.
I mean, China's communist elites aren't putting together such an Orwellian monitoring system just to blindly hand it's keys to any civil servant for him to leverage it's power against the elite's interests.
It's not just about this, but given all that is happening in the space of facial recognition, I think it would be really valuable for researchers to start looking at it like they would weapons research. Almost entirely nefarious applications.
After WW2 the University of Tokyo banned weapons research from happening in its research labs. I think we can be drawing more lines on research like this and take a stand against a lot of this.
The University of Tokyo could afford to do that because another nation had taken over responsibility for their defense. Who's going to be that protector for the US?
Postulate: how does the US being able to more accurately track people via facial recognition make me meterialy safer as a US citizen?
Because for me, that argument has a whiff of 'think of the children'. I don't think the NSA has done anything to make me safer, and I haven't seen any convincing proof to show they have done anything to help my safety.
At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
> Postulate: how does the US being able to more accurately track people via facial recognition make me materialy safer as a US citizen?
I don't think tracking people via facial recognition will significantly help, but some similar technologies might. Recognizing camouflaged tanks (or disturbed ground concealing mines, or flares vs engine exhaust, or...) would, though. And I don't think those techs are separable, if that makes any sense.
> At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
And if you think that neither country will be able to afford to attack the other and thus stop preparing to be attacked... Well, that feels like it'll invite an attack. Not to mention that some of those proxy wars might end up being "Korea mk2" or "Taiwan", both of which would make conventional military expertise extremely valuable.
Going to note that I am largely against facial recognition tracking to us citizens before I say this post.
Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime. Cameras would cover a larger swath of territory, and we would be able to find potential terrorists, criminal suspects, missing people, human traffic victims, etc. far more effectively. We would likely be able to identify people acting like they were about to commit a violent crime too, but that’s just an assumption based off my experience.
Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes. I disagree with it because it has significant side effects, and doesn’t address the underlying problems CAUSING cultural violence and international crime.
I think that as soon as facial recognition starts getting used to actually put people in prison, things like the Niqāb [0] are going to become extremely popular among criminal or criminal-adjacent populations. The side effects for the nominally law-abiding population will remain, and the program won't be rolled back, but the crime reduction capabilities will go away quickly.
But this might just be the pessimist in me speaking.
> Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes.
Until regime change makes some previously legal activity or status verboten. Your government collecting harmless data on your religion starts to matter a lot more when the wehrmacht rolls into town... (I don't think this is a serious possibility for the US, but for countries with less robust judicial systems or militarily superior neighbors it's worth considering)
Anecdotally this is a big factor when I talk with Chinese residents and how they feel about safety in everyday life.
When I bought a bike in China and asked about locks, the shop owner showed me, but mentioned that he didn't really see a need, he hadn't heard of a bike being stolen in a while, which he specifically attributed to pervasive surveillance. I bought a lock anyways, but was taken aback by how strong his perception was that he actually was weakly trying to dissuade me from buying a lock. And indeed I saw my fair share of unlocked bikes, although I also saw many that were also locked up, enough that I continued to always lock my bike.
And it gets to some really in-your-face levels. Some major cities in China have occasional electronic, public billboards posting somewhat redacted photos and partial ID info (first several digits of their ID card and their surname) of jaywalkers flagged by surveillance cameras, essentially naming and shaming in a very public way.
And anecdotally I also feel safer in many large cities in China compared to years prior. Drivers are a lot less crazy. In some, but definitely not all, large cities, traffic lights and crosswalks are essentially sacrosanct now with cameras automatically ticketing everywhere. As a pedestrian, cars will often preemptively stop for me at a crosswalk to let me pass. Pickpocketing seems far less of a concern. Most Chinese residents I see actually wear their backpacks on their backs now at tourist locations and on public transportation (as opposed to previously on their chest to prevent people stealing things from the back). It feels like night and day going to a smaller Chinese city where the old craziness of one or two decades ago still reigns (which is somewhat sad for other sentimental reasons).
Now this is both anecdotal and only based on perception. Even if there were statistics provided about this, they would probably come from the Chinese government which makes them suspect.
Is this scary how much power this concentrates in the government? Very much so. Is the Chinese government using this power to corral dissidents? Definitely. Does it make large sections of the Chinese population feel safer? I think so.
>Does it make large sections of the Chinese population feel safer? I think so.
I don't think it makes people feel safer with their freedom or their rights (property or otherwise), rather it makes people less anxious that people act outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour (e.g. act disorderly).
However, the problem here is that it is done by constant fear. Instead of educating people about why they should behave in a positive manner, they are coerced into behaving by fear. It's Clockwork Orange territory.
The general attitude of Chinese people that I speak to is that they are good but lots of other Chinese people are bad/don't follow rules. I constantly have Chinese people trying to protect me from other Chinese people that they are worried will try to take advantage of me.
It seems to be like breaking road rules. Everyone justifies themselves when they do it but other people are bad drivers when they break rules.
The general idea is that surveillance isn't for them but for other Chinese people which they are fine with.
A sibling comment already mentioned this, but I'll elaborate. Indeed, the people I know for the most part do not fear the government. Sure they don't want to be ticketed, but that's not really the same thing.
There are exceptions, mainly among academics and politically-minded people who consciously feel a need to self-censor as well as some businesspeople who fear anticorruption purges by the central government fueled by power struggles within the party.
But for the most part, the people I've asked about the fact that the government can see everything, practices widespread censorship, and has a sordid history of disappearing dissidents just shrug and point to how much richer and safer China has become. This includes people who have spent a considerable time abroad in Western countries. Which perhaps from a Western perspective is even scarier than a population living in fear.
To corral, as in "collect or gather", is an euphemism though.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
> Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime
It's a strange arguments given that you can use it in this exact form to support a lot of unpopular measures. Like banning strong encryption.
On the other hand it's weird to jump straight to face recognition without making sure that you put some real effort into other less invasive methods, already proven to work by other western countries. Plenty of counties like France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom have a substantial presence of people coming from vastly different cultures and crime rates are still up to 5x lower than the US.
There are plenty of measures to go through before jumping to face recognition. But I'd wager the actual goal of any country starting to rely heavily on such privacy invasive tech is not crime control, it's just control.
I don't think this wisdom will ever be applied, so for now I do support vandalism of CCTV. It is self defence because I am pretty sure my constitutions says that surveillance doesn't happen.
Crime never disappears completely, it just "sublimates" itself and becomes active in new "territories". You could say that the modern industrial society is way more secure and crime-free compared to the Dark Middle Ages, just to give an example, after all you can now pretty safely go from one town to the next 20 kilometers away without fear or getting robbed or worse (in most of the world's places, anyway).
But today, unlike 1000 years ago, we're also a couple of button-pushes away from almost total species annihilation (the effects of a a possible nuclear winter are yet to be determined exactly), to say nothing of the countless genocides perpetrated during the 20th century and into the 21st or about the the two world wars.
The US doesn't need a protector, because the US has immensely large natural barriers (the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean) that protect it from any other country in the world, except from Canada and from Mexico. Unless you think one of these two countries is an actual threat to the US, then I think in general you should be safe.
Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat? So the protector of the US can be the US itself - if it chooses to be.
> The US doesn't need a protector, because the US has immensely large natural barriers (the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean) that protect it from any other country in the world, except from Canada and from Mexico. Unless you think one of these two countries is an actual threat to the US, then I think in general you should be safe.
And if the US was willing to cut itself off from the rest of the world, this might be relevant.
But I don't think that's the case.
> Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat?
Um. I can think of a ton of reasons? From "they're not a threat now but give them 5 years to retool and they'll be really fucking irritating to deal with" to "they keep providing military and tech support to countries on our borders we want to omnomnom" or even "this will help with domestic political issues".
"Don't bother hurting me, I'm defenceless" works when there's a cop standing over your shoulder. Not so much when you used to be the cop.
> given all that is happening in the space of facial recognition, I think it would be really valuable for researchers to start looking at it like they would weapons research. Almost entirely nefarious applications.
This is an interesting perspective. Facial recognition is routine among people, and generally not considered nefarious. Rather, it's important to know who people are for a large number of good reasons.
The "facial recognition is inherently evil" point of view probably realizes that it's almost always a bad thing for the government to know who you are. But oddly, ID numbers and birth certificates, which are the normal government equivalent of facial recognition, don't seem to draw similar criticism.
Giving out an ID piece is consensual and/or a rare occurrence, compared to simply walking down the street which is a daily unavoidable activity for the vast majority of people.
It's similar to giving out your IP address to websites you visit vs. being tracked by an omniscient ad network embedded all over the web.
Because those are conciously produced when asked for? Otherwise they are inaccessible. There’s a massive difference.
The only way to avoid face recognition would be to wear something like a burka or maybe a hoodie. Two things that have been attacked over the last couple of decades.
And it’s not just governemts doing face recognition, at least with thoses there’s some semblance of democratic oversight - private companies with this data are far more insidious.
Technology itself is always amoral. Even splitting the atom can be used to achieve wonderful and horrific outcomes.
So of course “facial recognition” per say is not the problem. But in this particular example, we see how facial recognition combined with a couple hundred million surveillance cameras funneled into a massive government data processing pipeline can be extremely effectively used for persistent tracking and nearly instant geolocation of “suspects”.
I’m pretty sure we’ve seen how this movie ends. There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.
Maybe China will use this technology to build a veritable Eden free from crime and lost puppies. Or maybe they are closing the grip on a dystopian nightmare. I think you have to be pretty naive to think it’s not looking startlingly like the latter.
The situation in China is dire. USA is not far behind. Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street and it is connected to a massive corporate data processing pipeline that is used for persistent tracking of advertisement subjects. Only need to tweak it a little bit for vastly different purposes. Oh, and we work hard to improve our far-field microphones connected to the same pipeline. To offer you a better service [TM].
You make a critical point. Technology itself is always amoral. We are enamored by technology for technology sake, while we drifted away from our moral roots.
> Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street
I was burgled recently and looking for cameras and alarm systems. I was asking the police who came to check the burglary and they explained that here (Spain) it is illegal to point cameras to anywhere ‘public’, so the situation you describe would be removed and fined here. My feeling at the time was that now I cannot protect my property adequately because I cannot detect people at my gate as that would also cover the street so I would only get to them when they are already in after they disabled the power. But after thinking about it, I do think it is a good thing.
Ofcourse law enforcement here can do more, however they seem quite limited as well compared to UK/US/CN.
> There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.
What reason are you thinking? I wouldn't support it myself, but I don't usually represent public opinion.
GPS didn't really burst into the public imagination before 2007 and the iPhone; in a sense the technology is only about a decade old or so in the public sphere. Prior to 2000 the US government's official position was something like "this is a military technology".
As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.
>As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.
GPS chips are already cheap enough (single digit dollars), that it's an issue of policy\public perception, not cost
Maybe im naive but I don't see anything positive coming from facial recognition. Its two main uses are targeted advertising and finding dissidents. It could help find a handful of criminals, but considering the high level of false positives, the inevitable abuse like every other police technology, and the fact that I live in a police state where im unknowingly breaking any number of laws at any given moment, I don't see how it helps more than it hurts. Might as well require people to carry papers at all times and submit to police checkpoints at every street corner.
Face recognition as a technology won’t go away. What’s important is preventing governments and private groups from using face recognition in abusive ways. A legal framework for what is and is not okay must be established.
The simplest and most effective legal framework would be to just outlaw it. Of course the technology doesn't disappear, none of it ever does, but there are still plenty of technologies that are banned because they are a net negative effect upon the world. I still don't see any positives to allowing it.
Bad laws will always be made or be available for exploitation. That can't be fixed.
The facial recognition, in this case, is the right place to intervene.
The argument can be made it's a good thing for more people to be arrested for BSfaster to get laws off the books, however, I fear authority will exploit select enforcement to it's fullest extent to ensure they can put a sufficient number of problematic individuals away without stirring up unrest.
You can’t guarantee good people will always be in charge, even in “good” countries. Public opinion changes, new politicians get votes into power, etc. Which is why I’m against tools like this. Sure, it might mean I’m in favour of a few bad people getting away with crimes but privacy laws are about protecting everyone because one day it might be the “good guys” that depend on privacy and we might find it’s already too late.
It sure helps not to hand the tools directly to the oppressors.
Of course stopping all facial recognition doesn't suddenly make a totalitarian regime disappear. But having it makes some things way easier than it used to be.
For what? automatic tagging of faces in your photo library?
I disagree with your assertion that facial recognition can have only nefarious applications. In fact I'd say the overwhelming majority of usage of the technology today is for unlocking phones and tagging friends on social media rather than arresting protestors.
This is entirely unsurprising. Facial recognition for personalized (in public!) advertising is already a big market, and oh, various US localities are using facial recognition. This is, of course, on top of other tracking methods like ALPR and vehicle recognition, credit cards, cell phones, and so on.
It is no longer possible to be "off the grid". And that's quite scary when you realize that every single adult has committed many crimes (however minor) in their life.
Let's just hope that other countries won't implement the 'social credit' system like China did that for example bans you from travelling for committing even like you say minor offenses
This article is 2 years old, but quite relevant to current situation.
Deep learning and computer vision has progressed quite a bit in the past 2 years, mainly due to incremental algorithmic advances / improved engineering. Unlike fundamental advances, these can be scaled up with increased investments in a more predictable way.
Face++, the unicorn company mentioned in this article, is actually the product division owned by Megvii, a machine learning startup based in mainland China. They are planning to IPO soon (see: https://reut.rs/2L7zzGn ) to raise more funds from overseas investors (hence IPO'ing in Hong Kong).
There's some irony when a China-based computer vision startup working on facial recognition technology used in Xinjiang is filing for IPO in Hong Kong, rather than in mainland China.
This tech works, and the only reason we don't have this in the US is because of our cultural and political aversion to mass surveillance.
I'm genuinely curious of what this leads to in China, because this tech is easy enough to deploy if you're willing and politically able. What I'm cynical about is that I don't think China is competent enough to safeguard the data it collects, or forever keep it out of the "wrong hands" like the last guy in the video claims.
It's hard enough for US government agencies to protect data that should be privileged (police often run illegitimate checks on license plates), I can't imagine China can prevent its various factions from abusing this power.
It'd be ironic, but the incompetencies of their bureaucracy could actually lead to their own downfall by way of this technology (their mass surveillance apparatus) somehow getting coopted by dissidents. There's a misconception that China somehow has an iron grip over its people because it's authoritarian, but if that were true they'd have weeded out corruption.
Gait analysis (how a person moves around) is definitely also used these days, so the masks may make it a tad more difficult, but certainly not impossible.
You know how you can tell that a person walking in the distance is your friend, even though you can't see their face at that distance? Yeah, so can algorithms.
Unfortunately, in modern society, or really since the human condition has existed, we address symptoms and short-term fixes not root cause analysis and long term fixes.
Criminals don't usually want to be criminals, but sometimes that life is alternatively better. For instance, cartels in Mexico or mafias in general sometimes offer a better quality of life and protection that regular citizens don't get, so it is an attracting force.
We could fight cartels with guns and enforcers, leading to ramped up violence all around and making a health issue a dangerous violent criminal one that decreases harm reduction and increases addiction, production issues and safety issues.
Or to get at the root cause, we could fight cartels by ending the drug war taking away their massive hundreds of billions of annual black market funds, which gives them power of nation states over decades, and shift that to the legal market to help regulate and make recreational/health uses safer with harm reduction and addition support, as well as providing economic plans to give people a positive legal market choice.
Unfortunately we choose wrong largely because of propaganda by the military and prison industrial complexes and the incessant pressing haphazard decisions to blame, fight and go to war with the human condition when health/medical/personal freedom matters are criminalized.
We go to war on everything as a solution to peace and quality of life... surveillance state comes from that same corrupted/short-term thinking place.
The surveillance state has been going on for decades now in all major countries, there probably isn't much actual detective or investigative work even being done anymore, nor a case by case analysis for justification of these methods, just massive privacy breaches and lots of data noise. Smart criminals and corporate espionage will learn how to use that lack of investigative skill and manipulate the surveillance data, or gain access to it to it and dominate.
Not defending surveillance at all. But I want to mention that China's CCTV network is an important part of the legal improvement on self-defense.
From ancient time, the law in most dynasties strongly discourages self-defense because it's unjudgeable most of the cases. And it also could be a tool of murdering. Modern China pretty much inherited this tradition. Although the self-defense is defined in the law just like most countries, in practice it's way too strict almost like non-existence for tens of years.
Until last year, a famous case[0] causes massive debate across the country, and finally justified as self-defense. The main reason behind this is the massive surveillance network makes legal apartments confident enough to judge.
Yeah, sorry it's a bit old, but I came across it in some of my reading today regarding the San Francisco attempt to ban facial recognition software with an ordinance passed back in in May and didn't see it had ever been shared. Thought it was worth passing along. Cheers, just food for thought.
Is the kind of facial recognition only bad if wielded by a nefarious government?
Partly I think that huge DNA databases, biometric databases and millions and millions of cameras would be wonderful for catching criminals. On the other hand, the opportunities for abuse are too many to number. Has anyone written anything interesting on where/how to draw the line?
Jesus... This is a very representative example of what happens when technology is not used in a democratic way, and when it is. It can be abused as much as it could be used for the public benefit
CCTV doesn't help in democratic countries where crimes rates have been plumeting for the last decade. They do create a lot of dissidents though and rightly so in my opinion.
If I would be in reach of a public surveillance camera, I would certainly try to sabotage it. Maybe roast the sensor because I happen to have a bright flashlight in my pocket. Damn, I guess I have become a criminal now...
Not really. At this point the HK government doesn't care to go after the people tearing "all this shit down", but it wouldn't be hard. Protestors have the fantasy that they are invincible, because they know nothing is actually going to happen.
Agreed - up to some breaking point at least. As long as they can reliably put hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets, they are almost invincible.
China can handle thousands. Tens of thousands becomes a real problem. More than that and it’s impossible without serious damage.
HK would never be governable again after a bloody crackdown of that scale. It would either descend into hell and come out worth nothing, or it could spread into the mainland.
Both are unlikely events - I think China is simply waiting it out and ramping up the pressure. Visuals of army training and troop transports are having the desired effect.
I think the likely next steps would be to cut services and if that doesn’t work some rationing/price inflation of food and water. Start making the poor resent the rich, and ramp up the propaganda.
You need to see this in the proper social context. Yes, it's technology and seems like a new phenomenon ("dystopia"!), but that already existed and not much has changed. What if I told you that the local security bureau there always had all the information about people's whereabouts? If you were burglarized, you called one of them up and the thieves were caught. China never worked the way that most people understand.
