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.
China is rushing to deploy new technologies to monitor its people in ways that would spook many in the U.S. and the West. Unfettered by privacy concerns or public debate, Beijing’s authoritarian leaders are installing iris scanners at security checkpoints in troubled regions and using sophisticated software to monitor ramblings on social media. By 2020, the government hopes to implement
a national “social credit” system that would assign every citizen a rating based on how they behave at work, in public venues and in their financial dealings.
China’s technology companies are helping lead the way, scooping up unprecedented data on people’s lives through their mobile phones and competing to develop and market surveillance systems for government use.
The growing appeal of religion in China has unsettled the country’s officially atheist leadership. Three years ago,
authorities began removing crosses from many places of worship in Wenzhou, and last year China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs ordered major churches, mosques and temples to be “fully covered” by surveillance cameras. Cameras were installed at the Wenzhou church holding the meeting and at others, including some trained on pews.
In an interview before the meeting, the pastor said local authorities told him the video feed went to police headquarters. “I assume the cameras have facial recognition. Why wouldn’t they?” he said. “I have Communist Party members and prominent business owners in my congregation. If they think their faces are being scanned when they walk through the door on Sunday, of course they’re going to stop coming.”
Old news……. Chinese already found a way to avoid it in some cases, and very cleverly, by creating products supposedly intended for something else, sun filtering, skin protection, etc….. Cheap but effective products, which do NOT look obviously “anti-survalance”.