oh wow. like a real time streetview monitoring the society?
does the Chinese government really care? I ask because this is the type of thing that only enters a conversation when 'effectiveness'/'accuracy' becomes a discussion down the line. I doubt that China gives a s* frankly, which makes this even scarier...the data used to show it works will like be bad by design.
That said, the false positive rate is guaranteed to be high at first but the tech will be improved, furthermore the data will be correlated with other's rather than sole-sourced.
Sure they won't mind if there's collateral damage, but it's useless if it wastes time and effort by leading to the wrong person too often.
B. F. Klare, M. J. Burge, J. C. Klontz, R. W. Vorder Bruegge and A. K. Jain, "Face Recognition Performance: Role of Demographic Information," in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 1789-1801, Dec. 2012.
It's a bit of a cop-out just to say, "shucks, computers do the darnedest things!" Humans coded, tested, and deployed that service. They let something fall through the cracks, the awful implications of which detract quite a bit from all the good the service might ever accomplish.
My point isn't to excuse it, and indeed I'm not even trying to address the moral dimensions of it. My point is just that if this is a Chinese product developed for use in China, it's entirely possible that it won't work well on non-Asian faces without additional work.