Coronavirus: China to boost mass surveillance machine, experts say - 0 views
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China could use the coronavirus outbreak to boost its mass surveillance capabilities as it looks to technology to help contain the epidemic in the world’s second-largest economy.The Communist Party has built a vast surveillance state through different methods with technology at its core.As artificial intelligence and the use of data becomes more advanced, Beijing has found increasingly effective ways to track the Chinese population, including facial recognition.
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With over 77,000 coronavirus cases confirmed in China alone, the government has mobilized its surveillance machine, a move experts said could continue even after the virus has been contained.
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The Chinese government has also enlisted the help of tech giants like Tencent, owner of popular messaging app WeChat and Alibaba subsidiary, Ant Financial, which runs payments app Alipay. On both WeChat and Alipay, users can put in their Chinese ID numbers and where they have travelled. Users will then be assigned a QR code based on a traffic light color system which instructs them about how long they need to be in quarantine, or whether they are free to travel. A QR code is a type of barcode which is widely used on digital platforms in China.
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“The Party has increasingly treated ‘stability maintenance’ — a euphemism for social control — as an overarching priority, and devoted enormous resources to security agencies for monitoring dissidents, breaking up protests, censoring the internet, and developing and implementing mass surveillance systems,” she wrote in a recent paper.
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“Once these systems are in place, those involved in its developments — particularly companies with money to be made — argue for their expansion or their wider use, a phenomenon known as ‘mission creep.’ What initially started as a system to crack down on crime — which is already a dubious and vague enough justification to encompass political crimes in China — is now used for other purposes including for fighting the coronavirus outbreak.”