Data privacy woes grow as China’s facial recognition tech advances

This article is co-written by Tracy Qu.

It took 20 minutes of arguing before the hotel in downtown Shenzhen finally allowed Wang Qiyu to check in without taking a scan of his face.

Wang, a software developer who returned to China two years ago after getting his doctorate in the US, said he felt harassed by the hotel. “Airport, train stations, stores, and hotels – almost every organization asks for facial data,” the 31-year-old told the South China Morning Post. “But no one tells me why they collect the data and how they protect it.”

He is not alone: Chinese consumers, generally thought to be more accepting of trading privacy for security, are growing increasingly vocal about data privacy concerns as facial recognition becomes more common in the world’s most populous country.

Photo credit: stnazkul / 123RF

Earlier this month, a law professor in east China sued a wildlife park for breach of contract after it replaced its fingerprint-based entry system with one that uses facial recognition.

Guo Bing, an associate law professor at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, reportedly said he believed Hangzhou Safari Park’s change to the entry system was an infringement of his consumer rights.

“The purpose of the lawsuit is not to get compensation but to fight the abuse of facial recognition,” Guo was quoted as saying in a report by Southern Metropolis Daily.

Guo did not respond to a Post request for an interview for this story. Hangzhou Safari Park did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In China, surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition technology are used for everything from identifying and shaming jaywalkers to stopping toilet paper theft.

Many people clock in and out of work by scanning their faces, and these cameras have been used to screen people entering or exiting campuses, residential buildings, and subway stations.

The number of closed-circuit television cameras in use in China has been widely reported at about 200 million, and this number is projected to rise to 626 million by 2020.

This passion for surveillance has paid off handsomely for security firms and surveillance camera makers.

The country’s video surveillance equipment market, excluding home video surveillance, was worth US$10.6 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach US$20.1 billion in 2023, according to a report by market research firm IDC in August.