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China's digital glasses

Chinese security authorities have begun to equip the police with "digital glasses" and are already sitting on a data bank where the faces of 1,3 billions of adult people in the country are digitally stored.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

According to the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, Chinese security authorities have begun equipping the police with "digital glasses". With this tool, the police can quickly access information about individuals in public spaces through their face; It is a tool for so-called "face recognition", and individuals are identified with one hundred percent certainty. The Chinese state already sits on a data bank where the faces of 1,3 billions of adult people in the country are digitally stored. Biometric identification is statutory in China. The government collects millions of data points from every citizen. The Ministry of Public Safety has 170 million cameras scattered across the country, with a total of 400 million surveillance cameras in public space. In the past, it would have been impossible to control this huge image stream, but today this is entirely possible with the help of artificial intelligence.

The company Megvii provides the necessary software for the evaluation of the digital images. The "Face ++" program is likely to soon be a global market leader in the use of face recognition and the processing of the information it provides. Megvii uses neural networks – which can be reminiscent of structures in the human brain – to quickly and accurately filter out faces in large crowds. A low-quality image taken with a smartphone is sufficient for the application to succeed in identifying a face.

Megviis robots. Internet giant Alibaba and hardware company Foxconn (which produces iPhone) invested heavily in the company Megvii, which was founded in 2011. Megvii has also developed a face recognition program for shopping apps for the company Alibaba. In addition, they have produced a robot that makes human presence redundant in production processes.

However, Megvii's main customer is the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. Megvey's surveillance product ensures that police identify more and more offenders in public spaces. And China goes even further: At Zhengzhou Railway Station, they have tested a mobile robot police. The robots roll back and forth in the waiting room, identifying faces and "aggressive" behavior. Police of flesh and blood are only needed if and when someone is to be arrested.

Face recognition in China is specifically used to monitor certain population groups: In Muslim-dominated regions in Xinjiang province, the police are alerted by computers when "target objects" leave a certain area, reports the news agency Blomberg. The "target objects" only have access to a few predetermined quarters / streets in the city. To this day, the private sphere in China has no statutory legal protection.

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Hans-Georg Kohler
Hans-Georg Kohler
Kohler is a regular reviewer for Ny Tid. Artist.

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