A Chinese wildlife park has sparked outcry after making visitors submit to facial recognition scanning, with one law professor taking it to court.
Guo Bing (郭兵), a professor at from Zhejiang University of Sci-Tech in Hangzhou, is taking action against Hangzhou Safari Park, after it replaced its existing fingerprinting system with the new technology.
“I [filed this case] because I feel that not only my [privacy] rights are being infringed upon, but those of many others,” Guo said, according to an audio recording of an interview posted by the state-run Beijing News.
Guo is attempting to force the park to return the money he paid for an annual pass and highlight its misuse of data gathered by the software.
A court in Fuyang has accepted his case.
He questioned why a wildlife park would need to collect such information and had doubts over data security and who would be responsible if any were leaked.
The case could possibly open wider debate in China over the use of such technology by businesses and the government.
“China’s use of facial recognition, across the board, without any notice or consent, is appalling,” privacy expert Ann Cavoukian said, when asked about the significance of the case, which several Chinese outlets indicated was a first.
“I sincerely hope there will be more resistance to such surveillance, but I doubt it will have much effect in China,” she added.
Cavoukian said that facial-recognition software is highly inaccurate and often results in a high percentage of false positives, pointing to a recent case in the UK where police use of facial recognition software was wrong 81 percent of the time.
The park introduced facial recognition in July for annual pass holders and told those who did not register their biometric information by Oct. 17 that passes would be invalid, Beijing News reported.
About 10,000 visitors hold the annual park passes.
Guo initially tried to cancel his card and get the money back after the facial-recognition software was introduced, but the park refused to return the full amount.
Previously, cardholders were scanned with a fingerprint, but system malfunctions led to long lines during peak season.
Guo broadly backed the use of such technology by authorities but also said that the issue needed to be discussed more widely. “I think it is OK and, to some extent, necessary for government agencies, especially police departments, to implement this technology, because it helps to maintain public security,” Guo said, according to an interview with the Beijing News.
“But it’s still worth discussing when it comes to the legitimacy and legality of using the technology,” he added.
Calls to Zhejiang University of Sci-Tech to connect with Guo were unsuccessful. Representatives of the park declined to comment
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS