 Megan K. Slack of The New York Times writes about her surprise that her tour guide in China told her not to worry about leaving her luggage unattended. “There’s no crime,” he said. Slack writes that seems to be largely true because there is also no privacy in China, either. China’s immense system of cameras integrated with facial recognition and artificial intelligence, along with “everything from banking to municipal services to social media to shopping” is linked through the Chinese platform WeChat. Does the example of China serve as a warning for the ongoing consolidation of Americans’ data from disparate federal databases by Palantir Technologies? Slack quotes Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch: “The really powerful thing is when personal data gets integrated. Not only am I me, but I like these things, and I am related to so-and-so, and my friends are like this, and I like to go to these events regularly on Wednesdays at 6:30. It’s knowing relationships, movements, and also any irregularities.” Slack writes: “Ms. Wang mentioned Police Cloud, an ambitious Chinese public safety project that uses all manner of collected data to find hidden relationships between events and people; to spy on those considered dangerous (petitioners, dissidents, Uyghurs, people with ‘extreme thoughts,’ according to a document reviewed by Human Rights Watch); and to combine real-time monitoring with predictions for what may be about to happen. Predictive software has been adopted by local authorities around China: A Tianjin data project designed to head off protests analyzes who is most likely to file complaints; software in the city of Nanning can warn authorities if ‘more than three key people’ checked into a hotel. “It’s not that our government is using the surveillance infrastructure in the same manner as China. It’s that, as far as the technology goes, it could.” Comments are closed.
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