Chinese citizens are no strangers to surveillance, as they have been subjected to the country's mass surveillance systems.
The attempt has significantly increased since Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China in 2012.
The government has in fact incorporated an array of networks to monitor its citizens' lives, both in the real life using more than 200 million CCTV cameras, as well as the internet with the Great Firewall.
Earlier in 2019, Comparitech reported that 8 out of 10 most monitored cities in the world are in China.
And here, the government of China has upped their effort when its scientists have successfully developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera, with real-time monitoring and cloud computing technology.
As explained by Xiaoyang Zeng, one of the scientists who worked on the technology, the camera can detect and identify human faces or other objects, and instantly find specific targets even in a crowded stadium.
In other words, the camera can capture four times more detailed information than the human eyes can possible can, when identifying individuals from crowds of tens of thousands of people.
With the capacity to take both still images and record video, the development of this camera raises further civil liberty concerns about the rapidly advancing surveillance technology linked with AI.
Even the local media reported that the camera has received a mixed response from Chinese experts, with some predicting that the invention is meant for the China's military or national security applications.
Dubbed the 'super camera', the technology was designed by Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was first unveiled by researchers at the 2019's China International Industry Fair.
At the expo, Zeng explained that while other cameras were capable of filming thousands of people at once in a wide frame, each face is represented by only a few pixels, which means "you couldn't clearly see your targeted person at all".
With 500 megapixels, or 500 million pixels, each face in a frame is easily identifiable. This way, the AI technology can scan and identify a target within seconds.
China's mass surveillance systems have been used to control many aspects of its citizens' lives.
For example, the system have been used to value and engineer better individual behavior by awarding the trustworthy and punishing the disobedient.
In this instance, citizens with good scores can earn the VIP treatments at hotels and airports, cheap loans and a better access to the best universities and jobs. On the other hand, those with lower scores can be banned from travelling abroad, or even barred from getting credit or government jobs.
In many of the cases, the government can know these things by using the millions of CCTV cameras with facial recognition. Capable of tracking its citizens to just about every corner of the street, the government has a massive database about its citizens' behavior.
That technology, is further enhanced with body scanning technologies available in many places. And also with geo-tracking methods, the government has a constant gaze over its citizens.
And here, the 500MP camera could make all the above processes much more efficient.
Zeng however didn't explain how this technology would work, considering that 500 million pixels picture is huge. When having the picture processed in the cloud, with the data being transferred wirelessly, the process in theory would require a lot of computing power and a long time to finish.
