China enlisted surveillance firms to help draw up standards for mass facial recognition systems, researchers said on Tuesday, warning that an unusually heavy emphasis on tracking characteristics such as ethnicity created wide scope for abuse. The technical standards, published by surveillance research group IPVM, specify how data captured by facial recognition cameras across China should be segmented by dozens of characteristics -- from eyebrow size to skin color and ethnicity. "It's the first time we've ever seen public security camera networks that are tracking people by these sensitive categories explicitly at this scale," said the report's author, Charles Rollet. The standards are driving the way surveillance networks are being built across the country -- from residential developments in the capital, Beijing, to police systems in the central province of Hubei, he said. In one instance, the report cites a November 2020 tender for a small "smart" housing project in Beijing, requiring suppliers for its surveillance camera system to meet a standard that allows sorting by skin tone, ethnicity and hairstyle.

A screen shows visitors being filmed by AI (Artificial Intelligence) security cameras with facial recognition technology at the 14th China International Exhibition on Public Safety and Security in Beijing. A Chinese surveillance firm using facial recognition technology left one of its databases exposed online for months, according to a prominent security researcher. A massive database for 2,565,724 people -- with names, ID card number, expiration date, home address, date of birth, nationality, gender, photograph, employer and GPS coordinates of locations -- was left online without authentication, according to a report from ZDNet. Security researcher Victor Gevers, who founded the database, told ZDNet that over a 24-hour period, a steady stream of nearly 6.7 million GPS coordinates was recorded, which means the database was actively tracking Uyghur Muslims as they moved around Xinjiang province in China. HOW AMAZON'S JEFF BEZOS AND THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER WENT TO WAR Human rights groups have said that China is keeping hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in internment camps, where they are indoctrinated, forced to perform labor and detained.

The facial-recognition cameras installed near the bounce houses at the Warehouse, an after-school recreation center in Bloomington, Indiana, are aimed low enough to scan the face of every parent, teenager and toddler who walks in. The center's director, David Weil, learned earlier this year of the surveillance system from a church newsletter, and within six weeks he had bought his own, believing it promised a security breakthrough that was both affordable and cutting-edge. Since last month, the system has logged thousands of visitors' faces – alongside their names, phone numbers and other personal details – and checked them against a regularly updated blacklist of sex offenders and unwanted guests. The system's Israeli developer, Face-Six, also promotes it for use in prisons and drones. "Some parents still think it's kind of '1984,' " said Weil, whose 21-month-old granddaughter is among the scanned.