Beijing: facial recognition technology that was linked to the private health code was launched in the city of China which borders Myanmar when the authorities tried to tidy up the plague of Coronavirus.
China is one of the most oversight countries in the world, with the government rushed more than 200 million CCTV cameras to “cover all public spaces” in the last five years.
Surveillance has been widely used to combat Covid-19 in China, which is the first country to adopt a QR code system to record test results and track contacts.
But this is the first example of a publicly reported about the facial recognition used to track someone’s movement and health status when they enter and exit residential areas, supermarkets, transportation hubs and other public places.
“Everyone who comes in and out needs to have a code (health) and their faces are scanned,” officials in Ruili, in Yunnan Province, told reporters on Saturday.
Ruili found 155 cases during the past week in one of the worst viral flares in recent months to hit China, according to data published Tuesday.
“Security tools such as facial recognition cameras, smart door locks and road barriers (run by police or community volunteers) have been put in the main fields,” the local authorities said in a statement.
The scanner can also check individual temperatures, Chinese national radio reports.
There is no detail about how long the database will save notes or whether the official will turn off the system, which is monitored by the task of prevention of city pandemic, after the plague is contained.
Ruili, a city of more than 210,000 people, is the main intersection point of Muse in the adjacent Myanmar, which has seen increasing riots since the February 1 coup, raised worries that people would flood the Chinese border to avoid violence.
Nearly half of the new cases reported in the past week are citizens of Myanmar, according to the Yunnan Provincial Health Commission, although it is not clear how they entered the city.
China has adopted a zero risky approach to the Coronavirus cluster.
This has largely limited the spread of disease since it first appeared in downtown Wuhan at the end of 2019, with difficult border control, bulk testing, locking and bond with large technology to be tracked.
But new health monitoring slaw applications have also raised privacy fears.
Travel history tracking applications that are widely used and the virus test developed by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba together with the police, according to the New York Times investigation in January.
At the peak of a pandemic, the police in big cities wore helmets equipped with facial recognition and infrared cameras that measure pedestrian temperatures.
The rights groups have criticized the Net Surveillance Omnipresent China, said it was used to silence differences of opinion and target ethnic minority groups.