China's All-Seeing Surveillance State Is Reading Its Citizens' Faces (wsj.com)

China's government is using facial-recognition technology to help promote good behavior and catch lawbreakers, reports the WSJ. From the article: 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 (alternative source). 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. "I won't ever run a red light again," she said. 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.

Comments

Too late

[thegreatbob]

Too late for them; resist this sort of stuff before it consumes you entirely. Don't see the changes from day to day? It's called "creep" for a reason.

Re:Too late

[Rick Schumann]

Some of us do, and what do we get for our attention and trouble? We get labeled 'conspiracy theorists', or maybe 'luddites', or maybe 'potential terrorist/criminal' ("what do you have to hide, CItizen?"). Meanwhile idiots gobble up so-called 'social media' like it's candy, post their entire lives on it, and give you the stink-eye when you try to tell them that their right to privacy is valuable, and that they're just giving it away to corporations and governments that don't give a flying fuck about them as human beings, just as revenue sources, or as 'work units', or whatever governments think of people as. We're already living in a country (U.S.) where people are voluntarily purchasing with their own money technologies that can and are used to spy and surveil them 24/7/365 (smartphones, 'smart' TVs, Amazon Alexa and similar, game consoles with built-in cameras and microphones that require always-on internet connectivity, 'Iot' devices like Nest, so-called 'fitness bands', and so on) and are having some innocuous technologies forced on them ('smart' utility meters, which of themselves are not evil, but the immediacy of the data collection can be used to feed into profiles of people; when they're home, what they might be doing, etc; traffic monitoring cameras everywhere you look, etc). ISPs collecting data on everything you do on the Internet (even though they have to be lying when they say they aren't doing it, 24/7/365) and so on. Then there's so-called 'self driving cars', of which Google would love to see a world where no one is allowed to drive themselves, and the car has no controls whatsoever for a human occupant anyway, so you have ZERO CONTROL over the vehicle; of course it's got cameras and microphones inside it to monitor you, and GPS, and it can be remotely controlled by law enforcement, the government, and of course any criminals with the technical chops to hack into it and seize control of the car's systems. THIS IS THE WORLD WE'RE ALREADY LIVING IN, AND NOBODY IS REALLY COMPLAINING YET. If you do complain, as previously stated, most people look at you like you're nuts.

There will be a sharp drop-off at some point. Something will go too far, and it'll be the thing that finally gets people to wake up. Sadly, it'll probably be when the government(s) decide to openly treat citizens like convicts in a prison, with no freedom to speak of, and full knowledge that you're monitored and judged 24/7/365 everywhere you go, whatever you're doing. China and it's assholery anti-human policies is just the foreshadowing of what's to come. No government ever cedes power back to the citizens; power always seeks more power. There is a small chance that enough people like you and I are paying attention and speaking up, so that everyone else will be aware enough to avoid this sort of extreme dystopian future, but at the moment it's looking rather slim. It might take it being too late and there having to be an uprising. Or perhaps it's all really coming on too slow and subtle, and no one will notice until it's way too late to stop it. Or, even worse: it'll happen, and everyone will have been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that they'll think it's good and right and normal.

I'm actually glad I probably won't live long enough to see it all happen, and even gladder that I don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation. I don't want to see what happens afterwards. :-(

..but on the other hand: I hear rumblings of Chinese citizenry getting good and bloody well tired of Communist Chinese government bullshit. Wouldn't be the first time in China's history, or the last I suspect, that there was an Uprising and a Revolution of one kind or another. You don't want to piss off a BILLION people, now do you? They could kill 500,000,000 of them in a civil war and still lose. *shrug* you never know, human rights and democracy might win out in the end. Despite all my gloom-and-doom, there is always a spark of hope left.. We might have a Star Trek future yet..