Slashdot Mirror


Chinese Police Begin Tracking Citizens With Face-Recognizing Smart Glasses (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: At a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects. The AI-powered glasses, made by LLVision, scan the faces of vehicle occupants and the plates, flagging with a red box and warning sign to the wearer when any match up with a centralized "blacklist".

The test -- which coincides with the annual meeting of China's parliament in central Beijing -- underscores a major push by China's leaders to leverage technology to boost security in the country... Wu Fei, chief executive of LLVision, said people should not be worried about privacy concerns because China's authorities were using the equipment for "noble causes", catching suspects and fugitives from the law. "We trust the government," he told Reuters at the company's headquarters in Beijing.

This weekend while China's President Xi Jinping is expected to push through a reform allowing him to stay in power indefinitely, Reuters reports that the Chinese goverment is pushing the use of cutting-edge technology "to track and control behavior that goes against the interests of the ruling Communist Party online and in the wider world... A key concern is that blacklists could include a wide range of people stretching from lawyers and artists to political dissidents, charity workers, journalists and rights activists...

"The new technologies range from police robots for crowd control, to drones to monitor border areas, and artificially intelligent systems to track and censor behavior online," Reuters reports, citing one Hong Kong researcher who argues that China now sees internet and communication technologies "as absolutely indispensable tools of social and political control."

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Facial disguises soon to come by sheramil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I wonder how much trouble you'd get into if you wore an obvious papercraft mask with a photo of your own face photoshopped onto the front.

    It strikes me as one of those "ain't I clever" as you peer out between the prison bars kind of deals.

  2. Re:Well...thaaanks Google! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You kidding? Orwellian surveillance *is* Google's business goal. Any 'life improvement' caused by their products is simply the bait necessary to get people to willingly participate, given their lack of ability to legally force people to carry smartphones etc. (No matter though, since it's a more effective form of compliance assurance than governmental coercion anyway).

    Miniluv could never be a government agency, at least not in America.