Leaky Database Reveals GPS Surveillance Of China’s Uyghur Muslims | Hacker News Reader

Leaky Database Reveals GPS Surveillance Of China’s Uyghur Muslims

gizmodo.com

55 pointsvezycash11 comments

The technology and infrastructure to do surveillance of this scale is already in place/available in the western world (see cameras at every corner in London, Amazon Rekogition?).

So is this already happening in the west? And what can we do to stop technology like this to be put in place, considering a lot of elected officials don’t seem to consider this as inherently ‘bad’ for society.

Many citizens, as opposed to just politicians, are happy to be surveilled, as long as it's ostensibly being used against people that they feel hatred for. That's a key difference in this case. The West may have an easier time fending this off, until the day some politician decides to frame the surveillance as a safeguard against a broad social group, e.g. a religion, race, or political affiliation, as opposed to the more nebulous category of just "criminals", in which case I'm afraid I don't have much reason to think the West would be any more immune to such societal crumbling than China is.

Why so we think such abuses will be driven by politicians? These policies come from the Executive, only two of which are elected in America. It’ll be some unelected official driving these policies.

The problem is always the same. Information databases are never truly a problem until they're shared. So far the government/police/medical establishment/child services/UN/... are considered exceptions to those roles.

If we stop that exception. Fully. We're good.

NO information sharing without judicial oversight, in individual cases, with option to defend yourself and a default "no share" attitude. That would kill this.

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19176524

From that news:

> ... But the company failed to protect that database with a password, Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher with the GDI Foundation, discovered Wednesday. The database contained more than 2.5 million records on people, including their ID card number, their address, birthday, and locations where SenseNets' facial recognition has spotted them.

> From the last 24 hours alone, there were more than 6.8 million locations logged, Gevers said. Anyone would be able to look at these records and track a person's movements based on SenseNets' real-time facial recognition. ....

> Logged locations include police stations, hotels, tourism spots, parks, internet cafes and mosques, Gevers said. The researcher found that there were 1,039 unique devices tracking people across China.

> One camera was logged monitoring the Uygur population in Xinjiang, a Muslim minority group that the Chinese government has been accused of targeting with human rights abuses.

It truly is a peep into the future, and not just for China. High definition surveillance cameras combined with modern facial recognition techniques will be commonplace all around the world in the not too distant future. What surprises me is there doesn't seem to be much public debate about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com