State of Surveillance (how China has become Big Brother)

[mountaineer]

State of surveillance
The growth of surveillance technology is enabling the Chinese government’s rapid transformation into Big Brother
by June Cheng
Post Date: December 13, 2018 - Issue Date: December 29, 2018

At a music concert in China’s Jiangxi province last April, Chinese officials located and arrested a man wanted for “economic crimes.” Surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology had scanned the faces of 60,000 concertgoers and pinpointed the suspect.

In Hangzhou, a school installed cameras inside its classrooms to record students’ facial expressions during class. The cameras monitored who was paying attention, who walked into class late, and what the teacher was teaching.

At a crosswalk in the city of Xiangyang in Hubei province, a giant screen displays the photos, names, and government ID numbers of jaywalkers—a measure meant to shame them for breaking the rules.

And in Xinjiang region, home to 11 million Muslim Uighurs, local authorities collected DNA samples, fingerprints, and blood types of everyone between the ages of 12 and 65. The collection occurred through a mandatory government medical checkup called “Physicals for All.”

The Chinese government is amassing huge amounts of data on its 1.4 billion citizens. With unfettered access to public and private information, the nation’s authoritarian regime is developing an unprecedented, high-tech surveillance state, using data to determine each citizen’s “trustworthiness” and to exact real-world punishments. The ultimate goals: to prevent threats to government power and to incentivize good behavior in a morally unmoored society.

As Americans debate the privacy issues surrounding data collection by Facebook and Google, Chinese tech companies are steamrolling ahead, perfecting algorithms and using government subsidies to design ever more advanced surveillance technology.  ...  Rest of story at World Magazine

[Restored]

There is such a thing as too much data. It ends up hoisting people on their own petard.

[Fishrrman]

The Chinese seem intent on turning George Orwell's dreams into reality...