
Whoda thunk it?
Pot, meet kettle.
China has released draft regulations to govern the country's facial recognition technology that include prohibitions on its use to analyze race or ethnicity. According to the the Cyberspace Administration of China(CAC), the purpose is to "regulate the application of face recognition technology, protect the rights and interests …
They fine drivers for scratching their faces, so, why not?
If you go beyond the title, that article says the ticket was dropped easily enough, they immediately understood the mistake.
So it hardly compares with those US cops who did not admit that an 8-month pregnant woman was unlikely to be a carjacker and actually kept her in jail then sent her to court.
So obvs its totally way worse for China to have a set of rules that the police, party and security services can ignore* than it is for the UK and US security services to spy on citizens and residents when the law does not allow them to.
Totally different, in the sense of being very similar.
*Or maybe there's a secret law that says it doesn't apply to them
I was just in the brand new Chengdu Tianfu airport, facial recognition everywhere.
And frankly, it was a mess.
At passport control, their system happily picked another person's face, showing it with the wrong name, if there was more than one picked up by the camera.
Later on, and apparently soon to be illegal, there was a kiosk using facial recognition to tell you which gate you were supposed to go.
It didn't work, and helpfully suggested showing your boarding pass instead.
Except then, the camera (thermal?) was unable to see the ink the passes were printed with : they were shown as completely blank on the screen.