Next time you go through a red light in China its growing facial recognition network may catch you out

China’s traffic police are pushing ahead with a nationwide network of facial recognition surveillance cameras to deal with rule violations despite rising global anxiety over the new technology’s impact on privacy.

The central police authority announced on Wednesday that its platform successfully identified 126,000 suspect vehicles without a valid licence last year, for example. They now want to widen the network so that information on suspicious traffic activity can be shared with other cities and provinces.

The facial recognition technology checks the faces of drivers and vehicle details against a database, helping to verify the identity of wrongdoers much more quickly and improving the accuracy of traffic violation management, said Sun Zhengliang, Secretary of the Party Committee at the Ministry of Public Security Traffic Management Science Research Institute, in a traffic security forum on Wednesday in Hefei, Anhui province.

Shenzhen-based AI firm Intellifusion has been providing face-scanning technology to the city’s traffic police since 2018. In Handan in Hebei province, local police have teamed up with Guangzhou-based AI start-up Gosunyun Robot to introduce robots to help direct traffic and provide guidance to drivers.

The developments come amid rising resistance to the frictionless identification technology in many western countries, with Oakland recently joining San Francisco as US cities that have banned use of the technology by municipal authorities amid privacy concerns. A legal challenge has also been mounted in the UK against use of facial recognition tech by police, on the grounds that it constitutes an unlawful violation of privacy.