Chinese police are using facial recognition sunglasses to track citizens

[editor]

Pretty much inevitable it would be the Chinese who'd be first to turn this tech on their already mega-surveyed citizens....

China’s police have a new weapon in their surveillance arsenal: sunglasses with built-in facial recognition. According to reports from local media, the glasses are being tested at train stations in the “emerging megacity” of Zhengzhou, where they’ll be used to scan travelers during the upcoming Lunar New Year migration. This is a period of extremely busy holiday travel, often described as the largest human migration event on Earth, and police say the sunglasses have already been used to capture seven suspects wanted in major cases, as well as 26 individuals traveling under false identities.

The sunglasses are the latest component in China’s burgeoning tech-surveillance state. In recent years, the country has poured resources into various advanced tracking technologies, developing artificial intelligence to identify individuals and digitally tail them around cities. One estimate suggests the country will have more than 600 million CCTV cameras by 2020, with Chinese tech startups outfitting them with advanced features like gait recognition.

Chinese police are using facial recognition sunglasses to track citizens

 

[ska invita]

 

[gosub]

" 26 individuals traveling under false identities..." We had a pilot who used to always used to have trouble getting into the States coz the retinal scan system never believed he was who he was, And a friend of my brothers got held by transport police over an outstanding warrant for a murder she had no knowledge of. I wonder how many false positives this system throws up?

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Finding Wally will now be a doddle

 

[Pickman's model]

" 26 individuals traveling under false identities..." We had a pilot who used to always used to have trouble getting into the States coz the retinal scan system never believed he was who he was, And a friend of my brothers got held by transport police over an outstanding warrant for a murder she had no knowledge of. I wonder how many false positives this system throws up?

lots and lots from the sounds of things.

 

[gosub]

Finding Wally will now be a doddle

not with all these fuckers who turn up at festies looking like him....makes the game nearly impossible

 

[pesh]

i can see a flaw in the cunning plan.

 

[JimW]

It's famously a culture where people hate to lose face; now they never need to again.

 

[NoXion]

It's not good, but I think stuff like that Sesame Credit thing that was in the news a while back is more insidious and damaging.

"Report your friends! Win great prizes!"

 

[1%er]

They may be the first to be using sunglasses but many government agencies are already using facial recognition software without their citizens being fully aware. The police and other agencies in the UK have been testing a system on the London underground and overground for years, a number of cities in the USA and Australia are also testing systems.

I was at a conference a couple of years ago where speakers for those countries were openly talking about it, claiming that transport systems are great for testing as tens of thousands of people use the same trains at the same stations and times everyday, so they can see if the number of hits increase with changing software.

Reading the press around facial recognition, it seems that most governments are still way behind Google and Facebook in this area of research.

 

[Dogsauce]

I dunno, Facebook seems quite good at identifying inanimate objects as humans when it asks you to tag people in photos.