Chinese police are using AI to identify ethnic minorities

Evil usage!

Facial recognition technology is a very good and useful technology, but if used badly, it can also be a very powerful tool in a bad way. I just pray that it will not be used badly ... but it has already been used in China.

Track Uighurs with a street camera

According to the New York Times, the Chinese government is using facial recognition technology to track Uighurs, an ethnic minority of Islam.

According to government documents obtained by the New York Times, Chinese police have been interested in introducing technology to identify and track Uighurs since the beginning of last year. And from February of this year, a face recognition system was set up in Japan, and 500,000 scans were performed a month to identify Uighurs. This database uses tags such as gender, sunglasses, and Uighurs, and seems to be a mechanism for accumulating data along with photos.

Uighurs have been cracked down by China, but it is said that nearly one million Uighurs are currently being sent to internment camps. China is using surveillance cameras at a tremendous pace, such as tracking the location of people driving electric cars, shooting students in the classroom in live mode, and even people's social credit scores. Personal information is not protected at all, such as recording.

Currently, it is said that there are 200 million surveillance cameras in China. Since last year, Chinese police officers have been wearing glasses with a facial recognition system called smart glasses for the reason "to find the fugitive." However, it is a fact that there is a concern that it may be used for other purposes as well.

And this time we are implementing a face recognition system to track Uighurs, but in fact, since 2017, software for tracking Muslims has already been used in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The New York Times reports that Chinese authorities find it very convenient and completely non-malicious to identify individuals racially and ethnically using facial recognition systems.

It would be a big mistake if you had the feeling that the face recognition system would be used only for security to protect individuals. In the wrong hands, it's used to control and control people in this way ...