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How China Tracks Everyone

VICE News · 4.5M views · 2019-12-23 · 12:56

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Overview

VICE News reporter Elle Reeve investigates China's rollout of facial recognition and mass surveillance technology and what it means for citizens. The report originally aired on VICE on HBO.

On Hacker News

Cited as a vivid demonstration of the scale of Chinese state surveillance, especially in TikTok and privacy debates.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Privacy, surveillance & cybercrimeComputer vision, speech & NLPGeopolitics & foreign policy
Search by tags
facial recognitionchinasurveillance stateviceprivacy

What people said

fermienrico · 2020-07 · Recommendation

For those who are unaware, India banned Tiktok recently: [LINK] I support this move - in addition to censorship, there are serious consequences of collecting facial features en-masse with no checks/balances, especially by the CCP who probably already has a massive database of non-Chinese nationals. This also applies to any company (Facebook/Apple/etc) but I am significantly more concerned about CCP having this data than any other government in the world. People who are about to present with a counter US whataboutism, they need to first watch the Vice clip on how China tracks people: [VIDEO]

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fermienrico · 2020-07 · Recommendation

This is far better than having facial recognition data in the hands of CCP. I am not a fan of US gov, but if I had the choice, I wouldn't side with CCP. The genie is already out and we've failed to put laws in place to stop all this data collection way back in 2004. Surprisingly, I feel comfortable with Microsoft having this data. What a world we've created. For those who are skeptical, just watch the Vice doc on how China tracks people, it's on a whole another level: [VIDEO]

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Cider9986 · 2026-04 · Reference

This has been happening in China since 2018[1]. North Korea is able to oppress its citizens just fine without AI. I don't think recent advances are going to revolutionize government oppression. [1] [VIDEO] youtube version: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by VICE News, played through YouTube.

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