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Privacy in China: the growth of facial recognition technology in the private sector raises concerns about security and identity
- Authorities in China use surveillance cameras with facial recognition to record and identify people in crowds and on streets. Private firms use it too
- Property agents are among the businesses using the technology to identify clients, and with no real privacy protection, many people worry about identity theft
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Facial recognition technology is commonly used in countries including China in CCTV cameras, which can leverage artificial intelligence to filter through millions of profiles to identify a person. One of the most famous examples of this was when a camera pinpointed a man wanted for financial crimes in a crowd of 50,000 people at a pop concert in China.
Use of the technology is creeping into the private sector in China – used to monitor travellers at airports and for sealing mobile phone contracts, for example. In another instance, Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis News recently found that many property companies have installed facial recognition systems to categorise their clients.
Yuan Yu, an property agent, told the paper agencies need to distinguish between clients who were attracted by an advertisement and those introduced by an agent, since agents are paid a finder’s fee for bringing in customers.
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Another agent told the newspaper that some clients would try to get discounts from a real estate company and its agents, and facial recognition was used to log the recipients of discounts.
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