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View Full Version : Chinese Police Begin Tracking Citizens With Face-Recognizing Smart Glasses



Aragorn
11th March 2018, 03:39
New surveillance technology, made in China, and probably coming to a western regime near you very soon... :wry:






https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180310&t=2&i=1239469562&r=LYNXMPEE2902X&w=1200


Source: REUTERS (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-surveillance/china-eyes-black-tech-to-boost-security-as-parliament-meets-idUSKBN1GM06M)



BEIJING (Reuters) - At a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects.

The AI-powered glasses, made by LLVision, scan the faces of vehicle occupants and the plates, flagging with a red box and warning sign to the wearer when any match up with a centralized “blacklist”.

The test - which coincides with the annual meeting of China’s parliament in central Beijing - underscores a major push by China’s leaders to leverage technology to boost security in the country.

That drive has led to growing concerns that China is developing a sophisticated surveillance state that will lead to intensifying crackdowns on dissent.

“(China’s) leadership once felt a degree of trepidation over the advancement of the internet and communication technologies,” said David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, a media studies research project at the University of Hong Kong.

“It now sees them as absolutely indispensable tools of social and political control.”

Wu Fei, chief executive of LLVision, said people should not be worried about privacy concerns because China’s authorities were using the equipment for “noble causes”, catching suspects and fugitives from the law.

“We trust the government,” he told Reuters at the company’s headquarters in Beijing.

Reuters was able to verify that the glasses were being used in tests by the police to help identify suspect individuals and vehicles in the Beijing area in recent days.

China, under President Xi Jinping, is making a major push to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and big data technology to track and control behavior that goes against the interests of the ruling Communist Party online and in the wider world.

Xi is expected to cement his power base this weekend as a reform to remove term limits is pushed through. That would in effect allow him to stay in his post indefinitely.



https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180310&t=2&i=1239469560&r=LYNXMPEE2902V&w=1200

A promotion video shows an actor wearing LLVision facial recognition smart glasses during a demonstration at the company's office in Beijing, China February 28, 2018.


Delegates and visitors entering the Great Hall of the People, the venue for the parliament, the National People’s Congress, have to go through facial scanners. The same happened to those attending the related advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

“This year, security at the two sessions has some freshly-baked ‘black tech’ coming online,” wrote the state-run Science and Technology Daily newspaper, using a comic-book term in China for futuristic surveillance gadgets.

The paper said cameras at the event had been upgraded to capture, analyze and compare suspicious faces in around two seconds, powered by a system called “Skynet” - which has a national database of blacklisted individuals.

“The plot of sci-fi film ‘Minority Report’ is now basically becoming a part of daily life,” the newspaper added, referring to the Tom Cruise movie set in a futuristic society where crimes are solved and punished before they even happen.



https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180310&t=2&i=1239469561&r=LYNXMPEE2902W&w=1200

LLVision CEO Wu Fei speaks during an interview at the company's office in Beijing, China February 28, 2018.



ROBOTS AND DRONES

China has been deploying a growing arsenal of security technology, fuelling the growth of a domestic industry and worrying civil rights defenders about the growing intrusion on individual privacy.

A key concern is that blacklists could include a wide range of people stretching from lawyers and artists to political dissidents, charity workers, journalists and rights activists.

The new technologies range from police robots for crowd control, to drones to monitor border areas, and artificially intelligent systems to track and censor behavior online. There are also scanners to forcibly read mobile phone data and even police dogs with virtual reality cameras.

A recent Human Rights Watch report said China was also expanding a biometric voice database to boost voice recognition capabilities.

Surveillance measures long-used in restive areas such as Xinjiang in the northwest are also being rolled out more widely around the country, with a planned drive to centralize and standardize powerful but fragmented systems over the next year.

At the meeting of the NPC, most delegates said the increasing use of technology to improve state security was a positive, and that the benefits far outweighed privacy concerns.

“This is a good thing, it means our technology is really leading the world,” said Lu Yaping, a delegate from Jiangsu province in eastern China. “I don’t have any concerns about safety.”


Source: REUTERS (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-parliament-surveillance/china-eyes-black-tech-to-boost-security-as-parliament-meets-idUSKBN1GM06M)

Dreamtimer
11th March 2018, 03:41
Someone is going to start marketing face disguises. Some kind of stealth tech for the visage.

Gale Frierson
11th March 2018, 13:41
Seems the NSA has been doing that in the US for some time now.

Dumpster Diver
11th March 2018, 15:33
How to spoof facial recognition systems:

https://www.dailydot.com/via/how-to-hide-facial-recognition/

Further: I wear wrap around sun glasses all the time. Also, changing sun glasses works well with differing shapes. I cut my facial hair in differing shapes. I wear many different shaped hats.

Dreamtimer
12th March 2018, 12:34
My beard won't grow. :( My hair is long so...down to obscure I guess. Hats I can do, but not in summer. Too hot.

enjoy being
13th March 2018, 00:48
I'm not sure how well those tips are going to work for people who already have a head tilt and already look funny.

Dreamtimer
3rd August 2020, 12:41
Face masks are one of the best defenses against the spread of COVID-19, but their growing adoption is having a second, unintended effect: breaking facial recognition algorithms.

Wearing face masks that adequately cover the mouth and nose causes the error rate of some of the most widely used facial recognition algorithms to spike to between 5 percent and 50 percent, a study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found. Black masks were more likely to cause errors than blue masks, and the more of the nose covered by the mask, the harder the algorithms found it to identify the face.

[...]

Although there’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence about face masks thwarting facial recognition, the study from NIST is particularly definitive. NIST is the government agency tasked with assessing the accuracy of these algorithms (along with many other systems) for the federal government, and its rankings of different vendors is extremely influential.

Notably, NIST’s report only tested a type of facial recognition known as one-to-one matching. This is the procedure used in border crossings and passport control scenarios, where the algorithm checks to see if the target’s face matches their ID. This is different to the sort of facial recognition system used for mass surveillance, where a crowd is scanned to find matches with faces in a database. This is called a one-to-many system.

www.theverge.com (https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/28/21344751/facial-recognition-face-masks-accuracy-nist-study)