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Content type: Examples
According to police plans to enhance “school safety”, security cameras and facial recognition will monitor children in Hong Kong in class and around educational facilities. The move is part of a trend also found in China, India, and the US toward mining children’s data, even though few benefits have been found.Article: Hong Kong schools adopt facial recognition and security camerasPublication: Biometric UpdateWriter: Christ Burt
Content type: Examples
The Focus1, or FuSi, from the US-based startup BrainCo, claims to measure how closely students are paying attention via electrodes that detect brain activity and send the data to teachers’ computers or a mobile app. Lights on the headband glow red, yellow, or blue to signify the level of engagement. A backlash against the headband has begun in China, where a local authorities ordered a school to suspend its use after it was profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Among other issues, it’s not clear…
Content type: Examples
The Nigerian startup uLesson, which began by offering pre-recorded lessons on dongles, now delivers livestreamed interactive video classes to learners in a number of African countries as well as the US and UK. One of uLesson's investors is Tencent, which also backed at least three Chinese EdTech companies between 2018 and 2021 before China began requiring companies teaching compulsory primary and middle school subjects in China to register as "nonprofit institutions".Article: Chinese-backed…
Content type: Case Study
In the Xingjiang region of Western China, surveillance is being used to facilitate the government’s persecution of 8.6million Uighur Muslims.
Nurjamal Atawula, a Uighur woman, described how, in early 2016, police began regularly searching her home and calling her husband into the police station, as a result of his WeChat activity.
WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app. As of 2013, it was being used by around 1million Uighurs, but in 2014 WeChat was…
Content type: News & Analysis
This creates a restraint on all people who merely seek to do as people everywhere do: to communicate freely.
This is a particularly worrying development as it builds an unreliable, pervasive, and unnecessary technology on top of an unnecessary and exclusionary SIM card registration policy. Forcing people to register to use communication technology eradicates the potential for anonymity of communications, enables pervasive tracking and communications surveillance.
Building facial recognition…