Chinese law professor's social media denunciation of facial recognition in the Beijing subway system

[doctorow]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/10/beijing-metro-2.html

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[werdnagreb]

Interesting, especially coming from someone within the Great Firewall. I hope Prof Dongyan is not disappeared because of her insightfulness.

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EDIT her, not his

[Keith_McClary]

Here there is no law against it and they don’t have to tell you they’re doing it, so I assume they are.

[GagHalfrunt]

@werdnagreb

I hope Prof Dongyan is not disappeared because of his insightfulness.

As you can learn from Cory’s post, in Chinese names the family name comes first and Prof. Lao is a woman.

@doctorow

Lao Dongyan is a professor specializing in Criminal Law at Tsinghua University; on Oct 31, she posted a long, thoughtful piece to their public Wechat account about the announcement that Beijing’s metro system will soon deploy facial recognition to “improve efficiency of passenger traffic.” Prof Lao makes a smart, thorough argument against this, drawing on both China’s rule of law, international privacy norms, and lack of meaningful consent.

[DeclanMcManus]

Well, it’s a good thing they aren’t one of our major trading partners and don’t own 1.1 Trillion of our debt, so we can support the professor and tell the Central Committee to go stuff it!

Oh, no wait, the opposite.

P.S. A few days ago someone said here said that to dislike the Chinese government as cheap fascists and brutes was ‘racist.’ Maybe they can tell the professor that.

[anothernewbbaccount]

She’s toast, I fear.

[Shuck]

I guess China right now is a testing ground to see just how dystopian things can get with surveillance technology. We’ll get to see if there’s some point where society breaks under the weight of constant, ubiquitous surveillance and automated systems of control, or if it all actually works (or not) in a stable state.

[RandomDude]

China is driving the world towards a perpetual panopticon total surveillance society, and we are funding it with our debt and acquiescence.

Hell, we’re selling them more than half their tech.

I want surveillance capitalism in Silicon Valley to end already

[werdnagreb]

@GagHalfrunt

Prof. Lao is a woman.

@anothernewbbaccount

She’s toast, I fear.

/me Dumb*ss. My mistake.

[DavidVincent]

I predict a success rate of about 0.00001 % here.

[Wanderfound]

VICE (VICE)

[bobtato]

@doctorow

What struck me was the strong expectation among this Chinese legal scholar that the rule of law and proportionality will be observed by the Chinese state, which is very different from how westerners think of the Chinese political situation and of how we believe Chinese people think of their political situation

It may be that a typical Chinese fast-food worker or whoever would refrain from voicing political opinions, but it’d be silly to even have law professors if they weren’t expected to have thoughts on what is or isn’t legal. China can’t be completely monolithic.