China’s 170 million surveillance cameras know your face – China’s latest top news

Facial recognition technology boom

Writing and appearing on video in the Wall Street Journal, Josh Chin and Liza Lin report (paywall) that China has 170 million surveillance cameras and is likely to install an additional 450 million cameras by 2020. The government has a huge database of photographs and identities from the national ID card records and numerous other info banks from police and other state organs. And as two leading lights of the artificial intelligence world — Kai-Fu Lee and Andrew Ng — separately told the Sinica Podcast, the key to teaching machines to make decisions is to give them huge sets of data. So it’s no surprise that China is leaping ahead in facial recognition technology:
  • The Journal article says that “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.”
  • Government demand is a boon for private sector tech companies, which are “scooping up unprecedented data on people’s lives through their mobile phones and competing to develop and market surveillance systems for government use.”
  • In May, MIT Technology Review reported that Beijing-based facial recognition startup Face++ was valued at roughly a billion dollars. Technology from Face++ is being used in several apps such as Alipay, a mobile payments app used by more than 120 million people in China, and Didi, China’s dominant ride-hailing company.
  • Some tourist sites in Beijing are using facial recognition to limit the amount of toilet paper that each person can take.
  • One of China’s top universities installed scanners with facial recognition technology in a female dormitory.
  • In a different university, a lecturer is using the technology on his students to check on the boredom levels in class.

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