China Claims US Police Has To Rely On Its Facial Recognition Software

It’s already known that African was receiving help from China in spying their citizens. It turns out that the United States might be receiving China’s assistance as well.

On Friday, the South China Morning Post, a HongKong newspaper, published a story which claimed that it saw official documents with details on how New York Police Department is utilizing the same facial recognition software and cameras developed by China which have been used to monitor Chinese citizens.

The story’s veracity is still being debated. However, the increase in the use of surveillance tech across the U.S is undeniable.

The SCMP has claims on seeing an official document from the Chinese government revealing that the U.S is currently deploying a Chinese company called Hikvision’s surveillance technology. This is the very same tech behind Sky Net of China, the biggest video surveillance system in the world.

The report says it does not know how much this technology has been incorporated by the U.S. But, according to the claims of SCMP, it is stated in the document that the NYPD put the products of Hikvision on large scale use and they are deployed somewhere in America. It this is true, it would raise alerts on how foreign superpower is utilizing hardware to access surveillance resources that are used by the U.S law enforcement.

For specific details, the SCMP informs that the NYPD is using the software and cameras to monitor an area with a high crime rate in the Bronx and the U.S.Route 1, the longest road connecting the north and the south.

The use of facial recognition tech is a highly controversial topic.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft has warned that the widespread implementation of facial recognition tech could possibly lead to a future described in 1984, a sci-fi novel.

However, if the U.S is going to deploy facial recognition tech, the citizens might be better off that the technology is from China.

What’s disturbing is that there is an alarming number of U.S-developed facial recognition systems that have shown a serious gender and racial bias by making mistakes whenever a target is non-male or non-white. An unnamed staff from the technical team of Hikvision claimed that the technology developed in China does not make the same mistake.

He said:

Needless to say, this is just a claim of one person. But if the facial recognition of China does not exhibit any biases and the U.S. still persists in deploying this kind of technology, Americans might need to urge the country to quickly adopt China’s facial recognition technology.