![]() The Chinese police are also widely collecting DNA samples from men. The company did not respond to The Times’s request for comment. Online news reports show that the same contractor later won other government contracts to build large databases across the country. The first regionwide iris database - which has the capacity to hold iris samples of up to 30 million people - was built around 2017 in Xinjiang, home to the Uyghur ethnic minority. In the name of tracking criminals - which are often loosely defined by Chinese authorities and can include political dissidents - the Chinese police are purchasing equipment to build large-scale iris-scan and DNA databases. Police boasted that when combined with facial analysis, they could help pinpoint suspects faster. Software would then analyze the voice prints and add them to a database. In the southeast city of Zhongshan, the police wrote in a bidding document that they wanted devices that could record audio from at least a 300-foot radius around cameras. The police in China are starting to collect voice prints using sound recorders attached to their facial recognition cameras. In the police’s own words, the strategy to upgrade their video surveillance system was to achieve the ultimate goal of “controlling and managing people.”ĭNA, iris scan samples and voice prints are being collected indiscriminately from people with no connection to crime. One bidding document from Fujian Province gives an idea of the sheer size: The police estimated that there were 2.5 billion facial images stored at any given time. All of this data is aggregated and stored on government servers. These cameras also feed data to powerful analytical software that can tell someone’s race, gender and whether they are wearing glasses or masks. In an email to The Times, Tricia Primrose, a spokeswoman for the hotel’s parent company, Marriott International, said that in 2019 the local government requested surveillance footage, and that the company adheres to local regulations, including those that govern cooperation with law enforcement. The hotel’s front desk manager told The Times that the camera did not have facial recognition capabilities and was not feeding videos into the police network.Ī document shows that the police in Fuzhou also demanded access to cameras inside a Sheraton hotel. In one instance, the investigation found that the police in the city of Fuzhou in the southeast province of Fujian wanted to install a camera inside the lobby of a franchise location of the American hotel brand Days Inn. The police also wanted to install facial recognition cameras inside private spaces, like residential buildings, karaoke lounges and hotels. In a number of the bidding documents, the police said that they wanted to place cameras where people go to fulfill their common needs - like eating, traveling, shopping and entertainment. The Chinese government’s goal is clear: designing a system to maximize what the state can find out about a person’s identity, activities and social connections, which could ultimately help the government maintain its authoritarian rule. ![]() ![]() This unprecedented access allowed The Times to study China’s surveillance capabilities. ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the Asia Society, collected the bids and shared them exclusively with The Times. Chinese laws stipulate that agencies must keep records of bids and make them public, but in reality the documents are scattered across hard-to-search web pages that are often taken down quickly without notice. They call for companies to bid on the contracts to provide surveillance technology, and include product requirements and budget size, and sometimes describe at length the strategic thinking behind the purchases. The Times’s Visual Investigations team and reporters in Asia spent over a year analyzing more than a hundred thousand government bidding documents. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found.
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