Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe (1921-1995) was a brilliant North American computer scientist, educator and mathematician, who dedicated a lot of time to detecting patterns with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Back in 1960, he conducted the first tests on facial recognition. Surprisingly, methods of biometric verification aren’t as recent as we would guess.
Almost six decades later, facial recognition has reached the point where this technology is used to access buildings and offices, unlock computers or mobile phones, order a pizza, quantify work attendance, withdraw money from an ATM, manage a credit or pay the mortgage monthly installment. With the help of equally sophisticated cameras, it is possible, for example, to count the number of small moles a person has on their face or to measure the density of their hair. Needless to say, these technologies also have uses that the vast majority of citizens celebrate: they allow the identification of terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals.
However, there’s rarely any mention of the fact that users constantly provide free information for these facial recognition systems. Every 24 hours, more than 350 million tagged photographs are shared on social media. Published reports on the matter go beyond to point out that Facebook and Google have generated algorithms with a capacity to identify a person with more than a 95% success rate.
Right now, efforts are aimed at making AI use reach predictive capabilities. For example, micro cameras installed in vehicles could warn a driver about their tiredness or lack of attention on the road. Also, recruitment companies have projects underway to produce a technology that contributes to screening between better and worse prospective employees—there are NGOs that have spoken out against these announcements. Moreover, in the field of medicine, they are developing detectors to deliver a first diagnosis to a patient, out of an image. Although it may seem like a science fiction tale, an Israeli company announced that it is developing a facial recognition technology that can detect both pedophiles and terrorists.
Usually, we only provide our portraits for identification to authorities. Yet, we are not aware that facial recognition technologies could have dangerous uses. In China, the government uses it to monitor their citizens’ behaviors, including political conducts.
A software eloquently named Face++ has become the instrument with which the Chinese government is advancing towards complete control of its society. Over a billion faces (of a total approximate of 1.4 billion people in China) have been registered. To gather this vast data, they not only used 200 million cameras scattered throughout cities, towns and roads, but also used information offered by eight big companies. One of these companies, Sesame Credit (affiliate of the Alibaba Group, Amazon’s competitor) registers its clients with a facial scan, instead of a fingerprint or the iris. There exist digital cameras that are used in the streets with an amazing capacity to register and identify 120 persons per second.
The government has created a point-based system to rate its citizens’ trustworthiness. It will synthesize family, community, academic, labor, politic, legal, and other behaviors to a score. In Rongcheng—a port city located on the edge of the Yellow Sea with a population that exceeds 670 thousand inhabitants—, a pilot test is underway. People start with a score of 1000 points. That score can go down as a result of traffic infractions, critical comments to the government on social networks, complaining about the country’s situation in public places, delay in the payment of a credit, failure to meet family obligations or committing any type of crime.
Those who recurrently lose points will begin to pay the consequences: they will miss the chance to get a job, grant their children access to schools, obtain a credit or any other government assistance. These punishments created by the Chinese Communist Party will not only apply to the person committing the infractions, but also pass on to the person’s children and grandchildren. In other words, digital surveillance will produce individual and family stigma as a consequence. With the argument—excuse—of reducing or avoiding delinquency, the goal is to reach this extreme: that every action, movement, gathering, purchase and errand is registered under the vigilance and control of the Communist Party. A person’s reputation, from a totalitarian perspective, will be updated in real time. Those who wish to improve the lost points will have to undergo some penances or punishments imposed to them. Life will become a struggle to stay within a score.
But this is not the only imminent danger that looms over Chinese society. In the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang—Xingiang in the Mandarin language—, which has external borders with seven countries, and where the Uyghur ethnic group exceeds 45% of the population, the authorities oblige all the owners of smartphones to install an application named Jinwang. This mobile application allows authorities to check a person’s list of contacts, chats, internet searches, photographs and videos stored and any other information contained in the device. In other words: through Jinwang, the State appropriates the mobiles of its owners. Whoever refuses to install the application is imprisoned. Expert journalists in Chinese politics have pointed out that the operation is due to the growth the region is experiencing in separatist positions and movements.
With digital surveillance tools—which are going through an exponential expansion process—China leads the most ambitious operation of social control in the world. Fundamental democratic rights such as the right for privacy, to move freely, to protect our reputation, to work, to get an education and others will be reduced or denied with this enormous resource of digital technologies. Orwell’s anticipated nightmare is in its developing stages with instruments created by AI.
The fact that this operation is happening must set off the world’s democrats’ alarms. In a very short time these technologies can be implemented in other countries. Just as they are the reason for immense and indisputable benefits, new technologies in the hands of powers that aspire for the total and unlimited control of citizens, constitute an irrefutable risk for the near future of democracies. It is up to the democrats of the planet to set in motion a new field of struggle: to monitor the promoters of digital surveillance.
Para español lea El Nacional “Tendencias: Vigilancia digital, control social y democracia”
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