Tag: Facial Recognition Software

Why China Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. Than the U.S.

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Every evening as our children eat dinner, my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school. An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at. It’s kind of creepy, but kind of helpful, too. In China, surveillance technology and A.I. surround our everyday life. It’s built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps; almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery…

Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Are Breaking Up With China

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DCM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, began investing in China’s start-ups in 1999. The move reaped such blockbuster returns that in 2021, DCM said it planned to “double down” on its strategy of investing in China, the United States and Japan. Yet when DCM set out to raise money last fall for a new fund focused on very young companies and promoted its “cross-Pacific” expertise, the firm described plans to invest in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to a fund-raising memo that was viewed by…

Defecting From North Korea Is Now Far Harder

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The North Korean software engineer was desperate. He had been sent to northeastern China in 2019 to earn money for the North Korean regime. After working long hours under the constant watch of his minders, he found an email address on a website and sent a harrowing message in 2021: “I am writing at the risk of losing my life,” pleaded the engineer. A young woman who had been smuggled by human traffickers from North Korea into China in 2018 contacted the owner of the same website early this year.…

How China’s Police Used Phones and Faces to Track Protesters

Chin@Strategy

On Sunday, when Mr. Zhang went to protest China’s strict Covid policies in Beijing, he thought he came prepared to go undetected. He wore a balaclava and goggles to cover his face. When it seemed that plainclothes police officers were following him, he ducked into the bushes and changed into a new jacket. He lost his tail. That night, when Mr. Zhang, who is in his 20s, returned home without being arrested, he thought he was in the clear. But the police called the next day. They knew he had…

U.S. Cracks Down on Firms Said to Aid China’s Repression of Minorities

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said on Thursday that it would put limits on doing business with a group of Chinese companies and institutions it says are involved in misusing biotechnology to surveil and repress Muslim minorities in China and advancing Beijing’s military programs. In announcing one set of the moves, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said China was employing biotechnology and medical innovation “to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups.” The administration said those efforts included the use of biometric…