Big Brother is watching: Chinese city with 2.6m cameras is world's most heavily surveilled

When George Orwell wrote his satirical take down on the dangers of authoritarian governments 1984 was meant as a warning.  By allowing dictatorial governments to come to power through indifference or fear 1984 gives you insight as to how far government will go to maintain its hold on power.  Today we use 1984 as metaphor to describe our uneasiness with just how far our right to privacy has retreated.  Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have the ability to have access to all your personal details without your consent.  Further facial recognition is now being deployed in airports around the world.  Like all advances in technology the road to abuse will be unhindered by politicians, governments and the medias use of fear and paranoia as a logical argument to allow these abuses. In cities like London and Tokyo cameras are, to say the least ubiquitous.  For the Communist party of China undermining the rights of its citizens are the means to continued power.

Qiu Rui, a policeman in Chongqing, was on duty this summer when he received an alert from a facial recognition system at a local square. There was a high probability a man caught on camera was a suspect in a 2002 murder case, the system told him.


    

The city’s surveillance system scans facial features of people on the streets from frames of video footage in real time, creating a virtual map of the face. It can then match this information against scanned faces of suspects in a police database. If there is a match that passes a preset threshold, typically 60% or higher, the system immediately notifies officers. Three days later the police captured the man, who eventually admitted that he was the suspect.

Cases such as this, where facial recognition systems are used to help local police crack crime cases, are not unusual in the south-west China city, which recently ranked first in an analysis of the world’s most surveilled cities compiled by the UK-based technology research firm Comparitech. With 2.58m cameras covering 15.35 million people – equal to one camera for every six residents – Chongqing has more surveillance cameras than any other city in the world for its population, beating even Beijing, Shanghai and tech hub Shenzhen.