COVID-19 tech will expand surveillance state in China
China has developed new digital surveillance and social control technologies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
COVID-19 has prompted the government and private technology companies to focus resources on rapid development of new technologies. The country has rapidly developed and rolled out checkpoints, apps and programmes in response to the outbreak. Many will cease to be useful after the pandemic ends, but some will likely be retained, enhanced and turned to other purposes.
What next
The new digital surveillance and social control technologies will extend the surveillance state's reach, but the information they gather will not always be reliable. This could hamper the COVID-19 response and also result in the misdirection of public resources and people being mistakenly penalised.
Subsidiary Impacts
- Firms and the state can work well together at different levels and rapid speeds to develop technology in response to urgent needs.
- Chinese capabilities in areas such as facial recognition will be permanently enhanced.
- New types of monitoring may be used to assess citizens’ performance or entitlements in fields such as policing and ‘social management’.
Analysis
The authorities have deployed a wide range of advanced technologies in the fight against COVID-19:
- Drones are employed to verify whether people are wearing masks or violating lockdown orders.
- Thermoguns are used to scan people's body temperatures remotely.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) is used on social media in search of potential infections.
- Robots and autonomous vehicles are used to deliver food and medicine, reducing potential human exposure.
- E-commerce giant Alibaba has developed AI image recognition tools to assist in COVID-19 diagnosis (see CHINA: Beijing will pursue digital autonomy - February 17, 2020).
- Another tech giant, Baidu, supplied algorithms to help predict future mutations of the virus.
However, these are proven tools that had been in use for service provision, surveillance and social management before, and were repurposed for the COVID-19 context.
The government has also teamed up Alibaba and Tencent (the third of the 'big three' Chinese tech firms) to develop new anti-epidemic applications.
Health code apps
In February, the central government began working with the two firms to develop 'health code' apps that are now deployed in over 100 cities. Some local governments have developed similar systems.
The principle is as follows:
- Users are asked detailed questions about potential symptoms, their body temperature, travel history and personal information.
- In combination with government information, this allegedly allows the app to assess the duration of someone's stay in a virus-stricken location and their level of exposure to infected individuals.
- The app then presents a green, yellow or red QR code.
The codes are used in several ways:
- People with a yellow or red code need to maintain quarantine for seven or 14 days respectively.
- Municipalities use the codes to limit access to locations such as residential compounds, schools, public transit and business parks.
- Individual shops, restaurants and companies also check them before granting access to members of the public.
- Tencent has developed a specific app for schools that suggests which students can be permitted to resume classes.
These apps are an important part of the range of measures aimed at winding down the lockdown and returning the country to normal (see CHINA: Beijing prioritises food security amid COVID-19 - March 20, 2020).
Health code apps are an important part of the effort to restart the economy
Public reception
Reactions to the apps are mixed.
On the one hand, they are often preferred to more indiscriminate lockdown measures.
On the other, many people doubt their accuracy. Users complain in particular about a lack of transparency regarding how codes are calculated and the lack of error-correction or appeal mechanisms.
Proliferation of similar systems also means that some people must possess and scan multiple codes, making the process less convenient in practice than in principle.
The piecemeal development of the system also means that individuals traveling between different regions are particularly affected.
Many areas of China remain uncovered.
However, the greatest concern is about privacy.
Privacy concerns
The Alipay app sends the individual's location and identifying code to an external server every time a code is scanned, allowing the individual's movements to be traced over time. State media reports and police social media suggest that the police were closely involved in developing the system.
Surveillance and policing IT capacities were overwhelmed during the early stages of the outbreak:
- Systems designed to target relatively small numbers of criminals and dissidents were unable to monitor the entire population.
- Facial recognition technologies could not handle the sudden and widespread introduction of face masks.
These problems were solved partly by greater use of human enforcement (such as checkpoints at the entrances of buildings) and partly by firms developing new technologies, such as facial recognition algorithms that can handle face masks.
The Ministry of Public Security is one of the largest users of the latter system, according to its developer, Hanwang.
The public may now accept greater surveillance in general
However, citizens have generally accepted increased surveillance as a necessary response to the COVID-19 emergency. Now they are accustomed to it, they may be less inclined in resist its retention and use for other purposes than they would if entirely new measures were introduced from scratch.
