Dozens of Chinese firms have built software that uses artificial intelligence to sort data collected on residents. This is amid high demand from authorities seeking to upgrade their surveillance tools. According to more than 50 publicly available documents examined, dozens of entities in China have over the past four years bought such software, known as one person, one file. The technology improves on existing software. This simply collects data but leaves it to people to organise.
According to a tender by the public security department of Henan, China’s third-largest province by population, the system has the ability to learn independently and can optimize the accuracy of file creation as the amount of data increases. Faces that are partially blocked, masked, or wearing glasses, and low-resolution portraits can also be archived relatively accurately. The new software improves on Beijing’s current approach to surveillance. Although China’s existing systems can collect data on individuals, law enforcement and other users have been left to organise it.
Another limitation of current surveillance software is its inability to connect an individual’s personal details to a real-time location. According to Jeffrey Ding, this is excepted at security checkpoints such as those in airports. One person, one file is a way of sorting information that makes it easier to track individuals, said Mareike Ohlberg. Besides the police units, 10 bids were opened by Chinese Communist Party bodies responsible for political and legal affairs. The tenders examined represent a fraction of such efforts by Chinese police units and Party bodies to upgrade surveillance networks. This is by tapping into the power of big data and AI.
According to government documents, some of the software’s users, such as schools, wanted to monitor unfamiliar faces outside their compounds. The majority, such as police units in southwestern Sichuan province’s Ngawa prefecture, mainly populated by Tibetans, ordered it for more explicit security purposes. The Ngawa tender describes the software as being for maintaining political security, social stability and peace among the people.
Human rights activists such as Human Rights Watch say that the country is building a surveillance state that infringes on privacy and unfairly targets certain groups, such the Uyghur Muslim minority. The local authorities across the country, including in highly populated districts of Beijing and underdeveloped provinces like Gansu, have opened at least 50 tenders in the four years. Twenty-two tech companies, including Sensetime, Huawei, Megvii, Cloudwalk, Dahua, and the cloud division of Baidu, now offer such software
Huawei said in a statement that a partner had developed the one person, one file application in its smart city platform. The company said that Huawei does not develop or sell applications that target any specific group of people. The documents Reuters reviewed span 22 of China’s 31 main administrative divisions, and all levels of provincial government, from regional public security departments to Party offices for a single neighbourhood. A wide range of challenges can complicate implementation. Bureaucracy and even cost can create a fragmented and disjointed nationwide network, three AI and surveillance experts.
China blanketed its cities with surveillance cameras in a 2015-2020 campaign. Ohlberg, the researcher, said the earliest mention she had seen of one person, one file was from 2016, in a 200-page surveillance feasibility study by Shawan county in Xinjiang. This is for acquiring a computer system that could automatically identify and investigate key persons involved in terrorism and stability. Li said in the 2018 speech at an AI forum in Shenzhen, according to a transcript of the speech published by local media and shared on AuthenMetric’s WeChat public account that the ultimate core technology of big data’s security is one person, one file.
The industry developed quickly. By 2021, Huawei, Sensetime, and 26 other Chinese tech companies had filed patent applications with the World Intellectual Property Organization for file archiving and image clustering algorithms. A 2021 Huawei patent application for a person database partitioning method and device. The 50 tenders analysed give varying amounts of detail on how the software would be used. Nine of the tenders indicated the software would be used with facial recognition technology that could, the documents specified, identify whether a passerby was Uyghur.
More than a dozen tenders mention the need to combat terrorism and maintain stability, a catch-all term that human rights activists say is often used to mean repressing dissent. At least four of the tenders said the software should be able to pull information from the individual’s social media accounts. Half of the tenders said the software would be used to compile and analyse personal details such as relatives, social circles, vehicle records, marriage status, and shopping habits.
