Signal 2: Facial Recognition Shaming
Last summer, the Chinese city of Xiangyang implemented a novel use of face recognition technology at major street intersections. To discourage pedestrians from jaywalking into traffic, photographs jaywalkers (including their government issued ID) are projected onto large screens as a way to publicly shame individuals. A spokesperson for the government made the reasoning for the technique explicit, stating “If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbors or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it. That’s too embarrassing for people to take.”
This is just one example of China’s enormous investment in surveillance technology. Other forms include AI to catch criminals in large crowds, AI-powered ‘smart glasses’ for police officers, and constant surveillance across social networking sites. China now rivals Silicon Valley in terms of scale and investment, and is the largest incubator of surveillance start-ups. I share the common opinion that this represents an extremely dangerous shift in the history of computer/data science. From the 1960’s to early 2000’s, computer technology was widely held as a democratizing force for good. However, this is being reversed with China’s focus on surveillance.
It’s easy for people not in China (or other authoritarian states) to neglect that this trend has any impact on their lives. However, the Chinese tech sector is not a vacuum and what they develop will inevitably make its way to other markets. In the US, we can see similar investments being made by the Big Four (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). The only way to slow down this trend is to privilege liberty & privacy over efficiency by pressing our elected officials to adopt data protection laws like the GDPR.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillance-technology.html
