Dragonfly Eye Algorithm: Big Brother speaks Chinese

Perhaps the single most successful lie told by authorities worldwide is that people must be under continuous surveillance to remain safe. This excuse comes second to none, not even convenience, which is the reason why most people sacrifice their privacy. A third, interesting fact is that among the masses, most people still believe that the government knows how to protect them best. The artificially created safety dependence gave way to multiple forms of surveillance, even inside someone’s home. From video game platforms to Alexa, from cell phones to refrigerators, from smart meters to webcams; technology went from a set of tools that made life easier to alien eyes inside our home. The worst part about surveillance is that, like the story of the frog in the boiling pot of water, it has seamlessly made its way into people’s lives to a point it became normal for most folks to be surveilled 24/7, anywhere. Let’s look at the case of China, the largest and most powerful surveillance state in the world. China has embraced facial recognition tools to develop the largest Big Brother system on the planet. They serve to control the population, but also, “conveniently”, to make payments, get married, or get toilet paper. In January last year, the economic capital of China became the first city to implement surveillance technology in the metro. “The cameras detect the faces of all users, and check them against the database of people on whom search and capture orders weigh. As soon as it detects one that matches, it sends an alarm to the Police – which has agents in the stations – with the data of the subject.  In a case, the Dragonfly Ey algorithm recognized a suspect when he crossed the lathe and sent his photograph to the police, who received the image in the PDA they use to verify identities. The arrest was immediate, and Dragonfly Eye was not wrong. Since then, several hundred people have been arrested, although authorities do not specify how many were made as a result of using the algorithm created by the Chinese company Yitu. “Our system can easily recognize anyone among 2 billion people,” says company founder, Zhu Long. Dragonfly Eye already works with the 1.700 billion portraits collected in China’s national database, composed of the photographs of its almost 1.400 billion inhabitants – the new identity documents collect specific information to help identification by facial recognition – and some 320 million foreigners whose biometrics were taken at the borders. It is increasingly equipped with special cameras and this graphic information is complemented people’s fingerprints. In Yitu’s own headquarters anyone can verify the speed and the efficiency with which the system works. The cameras of this modern building in the Shanghainese neighborhood of Hongqiao record everyone who crosses the entrance door. The algorithm creates a file with the points that define the face of visitors and employees, and follows their movements throughout the building. The result is shown on a giant screen located in one of the office rooms. In a plan of the different floors of the building, the system draws the route that has been made by whoever stands in front of the camera incorporated in the screen. At each point it details the time of arrival, shows a photograph of the subject and offers the possibility of watching a video in which it shows what the person was doing at that particular point. Almost 200 local and provincial security bodies have already adopted Yitu’s system, which has worked hard on all kinds of events. For example, it was used in the Qingdao Beer Festival, where it registered the presence of 22 fugitives who were arrested that same day; in Suzhou, 500 criminal cases have been resolved thanks to the evidence obtained by Dragonfly Eye; and in the coastal city of Xiamen, which uses it in public transport, thefts in the bus network have fallen by 30%. The system even managed to identify the skull of a murdered man five years ago. “AI is a bigger and faster revolution than the industrial one,” Zhu says. “People are engaged in a debate about whether it’s real or a bubble, but advances in facial recognition confirm its enormous potential. In 2015, our system already managed to beat Immigration officials in their ability to determine if two images belong to the same person, and effectiveness has multiplied a thousandfold since then. Now, our algorithm can recognize anyone even with a photo from 30 years ago,” adds this engineer from the coastal province of Fujian. It is a technological advance that China has not hesitated to adopt to make cities safer. IHS Markit estimates that the country already has almost 170 million video surveillance cameras installed throughout the territory, and it will add some 450 million more by 2020. They are of all shapes and sizes, and they are everywhere: on lampposts and telephone poles, placed in spectacular batteries on the roads, and inside all the buildings. As demonstrated by a BBC reporter who tested the facial recognition system in the southern city of Guiyang, it is impossible to escape the Chinese Big Brother: the police only took seven minutes to locate and intercept a supposed criminal using a facial recognition algorithm that sought him out using the video surveillance network. Even small street stalls install their cameras hanging from a tree. This public-private infrastructure is seen as […]

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