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C h i n a’s
wa tch f u l eye
CHONGQING, China
For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial
recognition camera that allows
access to her apartment house is
simply a useful convenience.
“ Surveillance
technologies are
giving the
government a
sense that it can
finally achieve the
level of control
over people's lives
that it aspires to.”
— Adrian Zenz, a German academic
China is pursuing an ambitious plan to make an omnipresent video surveillance network to track
where people are and what they're up to. The Post's Simon Denyer looks at the technology that will
make this possible.
LEFT: A CCTV camera is reflected on a window at the entrance of the Megvii showroom in Beijing.
RIGHT: A CCTV display using the facial-recognition system Face in Beijing.
“The bigger picture is to track
routine movement, and after you get
this information, to investigate
problematic behavior,” said Li
Xiafeng, director of research and
development at Cloudwalk, a
Chongqing-based firm. “If you know
gambling takes place in a location,
and someone goes there frequently,
they become suspicious.”
Some of the
applications have a
slightly gimmicky feel. A lecturer at a
Beijing university was said to be
using a face scanner to check if his
students were bored; a toilet roll
dispenser at a public facility outside
the Temple of Heaven in
Beijing reportedly scans faces to keep
people from stealing too much paper,
while a Kentucky Fried Chicken
restaurant in Hangzhou allows
customers to simply “smile to pay.”
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