Tencent uses facial recognition to enforce China’s curfew on gaming kids Chinese web giant Tencent has started using facial recognition tech to boot kids out of its games. As explained in a post to Chinese social media service qq.com, the new feature sees the company check accounts registered in adults’ names if they are playing games between 10:00PM and 8:00AM. The company will then run a facial …
It's very creepy and you know this is leading to worse things to come but I have to back this to a certain extent.
Discussions with my daughter during her A-levels, the number of times she said that kids in her class would roll in to classes at 9am looking like death 'cos they'd been up all night watching TV or playing games until 4am or 5am. Parents who grew up being "parented" by screens are now passing that on, they turning out a lot of kids who can't spend more than 10 mins away from some form of screen for entertainment. My daughter is no angel by any means but she knew that she wanted get good A-level grades and she limited her TV, phone and game time to ensure she was able to concentrate on her work when it mattered.
Time management doesn't come easy to most but if parents won't do it, schools can't then the Govs will seize it as an opportunity to introduce creepy surveillance like this. Once again a few bad apples and one more item is ticked off in the "1984 runbook".
It's not just China. South Korea passed a law that minors were not allowed to play video games at night.
It's why Microsoft, which didn't want to get into time based age verification, just effectively rated Minecraft R in South Korea.
Like so many things, it's good in theory but the practical consequences can be bad or, in China's case, creepy.
Nobody sane would describe China as a "nan(n)y state". It's a brutal, repressive dictatorship. It is similarly incoherent to equate a fundamentally illiberal idea like compulsory facial recognition with seemingly obvious idea that society as a whole has a shared responsibility for raising children.
They're not "an extension of the CPC", they're trying to behave like good corporate citizens -- in the context of the society they live in. Nothing much more to say, really.
Except that we as a society seem to be regressing to our teenage years. No limits! You can't make me! Who are you to tell me what to do? Anything that pushes back against that is "brutal repression" or "the nanny state" or whatever. (There is a certain irony here because those that are loudest protesting this unwarranted state intrusion into their freedom invariably support causes and politics that directly impacts society's freedoms. But that's for another thread....)
Not nice, but in both Orwell's 1948 and Lucas' THX-1138 there were cameras everywhere, and the consequences in both cases were rather more severe than just being kicked of a video game. So there was plenty of prior warning. And in many places today the consequences of ubiquitous cameras are still much worse.
If Tencent's facial recognition algorithm works as well as most, I expect that using dad's phone with a picture of dad or for that matter a picture of a random adult Chinese like, for example, Confucius, in front of the camera will probably keep one on line past curfew. And if so and if Chinese kids are anything like American kids, 97% of the youngsters in China will know that within about 3 days of the first kid discovering it.
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