China Drafts Rules for Facial-Recognition Use

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ChatGPT. Last year, it began regulating the algorithms that underpin popular apps and internet platforms including TikTok’s Chinese equivalent Douyin and the ubiquitous super app WeChat.

There is no national law regulating the use of facial recognition in the U.S., even though some states including Massachusetts and cities such as San Franciscohave imposed limits, particularly with regard to law enforcement’s use of the technology. In Europe, policy makers recently agreed on a draft version of a law governing artificial intelligence, which will ban the use of real-time facial recognition in public spaces by police and other state security forces.

The Chinese rules also come after China’s Covid controls led to the blanket adoption of location logging and access-control technologies. Graham Webster, a research scholar who heads the Stanford University-based DigiChina Project that examines China’s digital-policy developments, said the draft seems aimed at discouraging unnecessary use of facial recognition.

“If enforced, it would cool the proliferation of biometric gadgetry outside security 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