China Drafts Rules for Facial-Recognition Use

The draft from the web regulator, the Cybersecurity Administration of China, proposes to limit using the expertise to cases the place it has a selected goal and is sufficiently crucial. The guidelines additionally ban using the expertise for figuring out race, ethnicity, spiritual perception or well being standing—functions that haven’t been scientifically confirmed—until an individual has given consent or for the needs of nationwide safety.

The stipulations deliver China’s stance on non-public and business makes use of of facial recognition nearer to Western norms, together with guidelines proposed within the European Union and by native governments within the U.S. It additionally leaves exceptions for national-security-related makes use of of the expertise, a typical characteristic amongst China’s information and safety laws.

“Within one legislation you will have provisions that mirror an authoritarian tech-enabled superpower and in addition real concern about misuse of the expertise,” said Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. “That’s the sweet and sour approach of Chinese governance.”

The proposal is the newest in a collection of strikes by China’s authorities to place guardrails round how corporations use information and synthetic intelligence, placing it on the forefront of world makes an attempt to control cutting-edge expertise.

Earlier this yr, the regulator carried out guidelines on so-called deepfakes, AI-generated media, and proposed others on generative AI instruments just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last yr, it started regulating the algorithms that underpin in style apps and web platforms together with TikTok’s Chinese equal Douyin and the ever present tremendous app WeChat.

There isn’t any nationwide legislation regulating using facial recognition within the U.S., although some states together with Massachusetts and cities reminiscent of San Franciscohave imposed limits, significantly with regard to legislation enforcement’s use of the expertise. In Europe, coverage makers not too long ago agreed on a draft model of a legislation governing synthetic intelligence, which can ban using real-time facial recognition in public areas by police and different state safety forces.

The Chinese guidelines additionally come after China’s Covid controls led to the blanket adoption of location logging and access-control applied sciences.

Graham Webster, a analysis scholar who heads the Stanford University-based DigiChina Project that examines China’s digital-policy developments, mentioned the draft appears geared toward discouraging pointless use of facial recognition. “If enforced, it could cool the proliferation of biometric gadgetry outdoors safety contexts,” he said.

Facial-recognition use in China has been burgeoning over the past seven years, with the means to use your face as a form of identity mushrooming in malls, office buildings, airports and hotels. Chinese consumers can opt to use their faces to pay for items in some stores, enter buildings and for identity checks before boarding a plane.

Surveillance cameras are ubiquitous in many Chinese cities, and some of China’s largest facial-recognition suppliers have partnerships with local police to provide the technology for security purposes—tracking not just criminals but also dissidents, ethnic minorities and others the government sees as threatening national security.

Such technology is at the heart of international criticism of Beijing for its treatment of ethnic minority groups in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has carried out a campaign of forced ethnic assimilation targeting Turkic Muslims. Authorities in Xinjiang have used facial recognition and other surveillance tools to track and sort Muslims, sending hundreds of thousands to internment camps for political indoctrination, according to researchers. China has rejected those allegations, referring to its policies in Xinjiang as a campaign to prevent terrorism.

Many people in China greeted the initial rollout of smart cameras with enthusiasm or indifference, adopting the technology in their everyday life. Still, Chinese leaders have faced growing unhappiness over the widespread use of facial recognition.

In a rare lawsuit over the technology in 2019, a Chinese law professor, Guo Bing, accused a zoo in the coastal city of Hangzhou of violating his consumer rights by requiring him to use a facial-recognition system to gain entrance to the zoo—and barring him when he didn’t comply. The court ordered the zoo to pay damages to Guo and delete his data but left unaddressed whether it was legal for the zoo to continue to force visitors to undergo facial recognition.

A survey of public attitudes toward facial recognition in 2019 by the Nandu Personal Information Protection Research Center, a think tank in south China, also found regular Chinese were increasingly concerned their personal information was being leaked due to a lack of data security.

Tuesday’s proposed regulation pulls together and fleshes out in one framework the restrictions on the use of face-recognition technology scattered throughout various laws in China, including in the national privacy law passed in 2021. It states, for example, that facial data shouldn’t be collected and used without consent, reiterating a key aspect of China’s 2017 Cybersecurity Law, which requires individual consent for personal-data collection.

Part of this redundancy is practical: to make clear exactly how an existing law should be applied to the facial recognition context, Webster said. Through the rules, Beijing is also signaling that it is aware of the public concerns, Sacks said.

Some provisions in the regulation go into granular detail, stating for example that facial recognition shouldn’t be used in hotel rooms, bathrooms or toilets, places where the public has heavily pushed back on uses of the technology before. It also outlaws moves by entities to pressure individuals to adopt face recognition, such as in the case of the zoo, as a method to establish their identities.

At the same time, China, under its leader Xi Jinping, has been expanding its definition of national security to cover anything seen as undermining Communist Party rule, as Xi braces the country for a potential confrontation with the West. In July, a revised and tightened anti-espionage law took effect, raising concerns among foreign governments and businesses.

The proposed regulation is the latest effort by authorities to walk the fine line between acknowledging public debate and maintaining tight control on the country’s security. “It allows the government to have both a pressure valve release through showing the public that they’re being responsive but also to deflect attention of the use of these technologies by central authorities,” Sacks mentioned.