It is now a legal requirement for people to sign in to their new smartphones with the face-scanning feature in China. The new rules were outlined by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology – MIIT, and they came in effect on Sunday.
They ask for new phone plan users to send face scans, together with their national ID cards. This way, they ensure that their devices are linked to their real identities.
MITT stated that they made this move in order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens in cyberspace. This protects users and their phones from fraud.
But there are some concerns, as well. This might have been the first step in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘s construction of the biggest surveillance regime from all around the world. The government receives harsh criticism, especially on social media platforms. Many people talk about the requirements.
One commander suggested that the real-name registration of phone plans by using ID cards has been a requirement in China for many years now, and sales phone calls and scams could not be stopped, anyway. Gathering information from users like this is a violation of people’s civil rights.
The CCP censors the internet in China, and here we are talking about more than 850 million mobile internet users. Many of the social media sites and news sites are blocked – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – and the entire thing is known as ‘The Great Firewall.’ Apparently, Chinese authorities have invested a lot of time and money in the face recognition technology, so that they could keep the population closer to them. Right now, there are 200 million surveillance cameras that are operating in the country. The government is also developing a social credit system, which has its aim to rate citizens on factors such as their loyalty to the CCP. The system will be fully implemented in 2020 and will include “punishments” like transport restrictions for those that have low scores.
