China spies on citizens with half a billion cameras | Abroad

The New York Times concluded this after a year-long investigation in which reporters analyzed 100,000 Chinese government documents. These documents concerned the acquisition of equipment for the surveillance system.

The documents show that the Chinese government is going to extreme lengths to keep tabs on its citizens. At the national and local levels, administrators seem to seek “maximum oversight”. In addition to cameras in the street, Chinese people should also be monitored in the store and in the restaurant, they believe. The police can also ask hotels for images.

Ambition

And the figures show that China takes its ambitions in this area seriously. It is estimated that the Chinese government has access to over 500 million security cameras. And with that, the party has access to half of all the security cameras in the world. With the images from these cameras, self-learning algorithms are built to learn to recognize individuals. And the Chinese database is now colossal: it would contain 2.5 billion photos of faces, with which the police want to “control and manage people”.

But the Chinese government continues to collect DNA, iris scans, phones and voice recordings with special microphones with a range of 100 meters. For some time now you can also be fined in some places if you run a red light. The cameras recognize who it is and that’s how you get a fine on the mat.