Human Rights Watch decodes surveillance app used to classify people in China’s Xinjiang region
- Program analyses personal data collected by officials and decides if an individual should be put under closer observation
- Big data used to decide the 36 ‘person types’ of most interest to the authorities
A report by Human Rights Watch has revealed details of a mobile app being used by police and other authorities in China’s far west region of Xinjiang to identify target groups for enhanced surveillance and monitoring.
The document, released on Thursday, sheds light on the new technologies – from big data analysis to facial recognition and artificial intelligence – employed by China’s security agencies to build an extensive and advanced surveillance system for social control in the predominantly Muslim region.
The report said it provides “a detailed description and analysis of a mobile app that police and other officials use to communicate with the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP)”.
The program analyses information about local people collected by officials during home visits and on other occasions, and if an individual’s profile matches any of the 36 “person types” deemed to require closer observation, an alert is sent to the relevant authorities. Police can also be notified of any such “investigative missions”, the report said.
By reverse engineering the app, “we now know specifically the kinds of behaviours and people this mass surveillance system targets”, the group said.