Beijing Subway Trials Facial Recognition and it Wants Your Face

The Beijing subway system has begun experimenting with facial recognition technology, which if accurate enough is likely to be applied to the entire Beijing subway network, according to a report published on Wednesday by Beijing Youth Daily. The first trials of the new technology are so far confined to the Beijing Airport Express line.

While the application of AI and facial recognition technology in China – a common occurrence – is not news in itself, this particular development raises concerns about how the new system will affect foreigners and tourists, as well as familiar worries around data security, and commonly held beliefs about the perceived omnipresence (or not) of Chinese state surveillance. 

As the system is being tested on the Airport Express, it will inevitably act as a dragnet for data on Chinese citizens, tourists, and non-Chinese travelers alike, raising concerns as to how this data may be used in the future. Also, it is not yet clear whether all passengers will be required to submit to the facial recognition system in order to ride the subway, or if buying a physical ticket will remain an option.

Speaking to Global Times, Zhou Minfeng, a senior analyst at Beijing-based iResearch Consulting Group stated that for such systems to be effective, they must be able to draw upon an almost wholly comprehensive database. "Accuracy represents the system's ability to match the face of a passenger with an existing facial photo in the database. It's difficult to be 100 percent correct, but currently, the rate of above 99 percent is high enough for most applications."

In order to achieve such accuracy, it is probable that the transport authority will purchase the necessary database from third-party organizations such as Alipay or WeChat. "Since it's running a system with such massive data requirements, it is possible that the Beijing subway will share databases with third-party payment platforms so that passengers can simply link their accounts to give access to the facial recognition system," Zhou told Global Times.

As for newcomers to China, it is also not certain exactly when, where, and by whom such biometric data would be collected. While all travelers entering China must submit fingerprint ID and have their photo taken at airport immigration, non-Chinese are likely to balk at the idea of having their highly sensitive data shared so freely between state and non-state organizations, especially ones which are unlikely to have equally robust security measures and data protection capabilities. 

Unfortunately, data breaches in both public and private sectors are not uncommon. As reported in TechCrunch back in May, a security researcher was able to access the entire database – hosted by Alibaba – of a facial recognition system collecting data in Beijing's Liangmaqiao area simply by using a web browser. "The database was an Elasticsearch database, storing gigabytes of data – including facial recognition scans on hundreds of people over several months." A statement from an Alibaba spokesperson at the time that said “customers are always advised to protect their data by setting a secure password" was far from reassuring.

In this new age, citizens of Beijing must come to terms with the Chinese surveillance state having access to all of our sensitive data, that such data will likely be shared with private companies with private interests, and that the same data could eventually be leaked online for anybody to find and potentially use for nefarious purposes.

Such an age, in which no appealing options exist, has been described as 'Chabudwellian' by New York Times writer Paul Mozur. A portmanteau of the words chabuduo (差不多) meaning "almost" or "good enough," and Orwellianism, it describes "the combination of half-assed execution and Orwellian ambitions that characterizes the state of Chinese surveillance at the moment."

Half-assed or not, the end result is the same, and facial recognition technology is not going away any time soon whether we like or not.

Think you can recycle according to China's new waste regulations? We'd like to see you try.

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Images: Fortune