It all started with a text message from his local zoo. In early 2019, Guo had bought an annual pass for a safari park in the eastern city of Hangzhou, so he could take his kid to see the animals on weekends. Six months later, the venue notified him about a new security policy. In the future, all passholders would have to enter the park using a newly installed face-scanning system, the message stated. Anyone refusing to comply would be denied entry. Guo, a legal professor at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, was outraged. He couldn’t understand how a zoo could justify requiring customers to hand over their biometric information. When he visited the park, he also found it was doing little to protect the data.
fredag 25. juni 2021
A Professor, a Zoo, and the Future of Facial Recognition in China
Guo Bing never intended to become a public figure. But over the past 18 months, the academic has been thrust into the center of a debate over one of China’s most contentious social issues: the country’s gung-ho embrace of facial recognition technology.
It all started with a text message from his local zoo. In early 2019, Guo had bought an annual pass for a safari park in the eastern city of Hangzhou, so he could take his kid to see the animals on weekends. Six months later, the venue notified him about a new security policy. In the future, all passholders would have to enter the park using a newly installed face-scanning system, the message stated. Anyone refusing to comply would be denied entry. Guo, a legal professor at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, was outraged. He couldn’t understand how a zoo could justify requiring customers to hand over their biometric information. When he visited the park, he also found it was doing little to protect the data.
It all started with a text message from his local zoo. In early 2019, Guo had bought an annual pass for a safari park in the eastern city of Hangzhou, so he could take his kid to see the animals on weekends. Six months later, the venue notified him about a new security policy. In the future, all passholders would have to enter the park using a newly installed face-scanning system, the message stated. Anyone refusing to comply would be denied entry. Guo, a legal professor at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, was outraged. He couldn’t understand how a zoo could justify requiring customers to hand over their biometric information. When he visited the park, he also found it was doing little to protect the data.
