Chinese Police Expand Use of Terminator-like Smart Glasses for Surveillance

It has been reported that China is stepping up its surveillance and security game by expanding its use of high-tech sunglasses with facial recognition technology. The glasses, powered by Artificial Intelligence, scan the faces of vehicle occupants and licence plates, flagging with a red box and warning sign to the wearer when any match up with a centralised “blacklist”.

Evgeny Chereshnev, CEO at Biolink.Tech, said: "Devices that can perform face-recognition analysis, and work with numerous computer bases in real time, give the person wearing it tremendous power over people. In the foreseeable future, such policemen literally could become Robocops - see it all, know it all and, frankly speaking, arrest anybody who is mathematically proven to be a potential threat.

"Those are all scary, but realistic scenarios. Such devices can be called “absolute privacy destruction weapons” and have to be treated as such. For some law enforcement tasks, such devices with real-time criminal record and biometry access could potentially be helpful. But there is no way those should be available to the mass market.

"Real-time identity scanners must become a heavily regulated business, similar to the weapons and ammunition industries in Europe or Singapore. Only officers on duty must have access to it with mandatory and law-enforced accountability and transparency tools in place. Free legal courts must always have a way to make sure that any chosen officer did not use such a device for personal purposes or in any way violated the privacy of people who gave no motives to be suspected of a crime.

"Otherwise, we would start with fun high-tech glasses today, and wake up in “1984” tomorrow - a police state where your thoughts are analysed on the go and those who can afford freedom of speech or thought get killed or tortured for their desire of simply being different."