BEIJING — The Chinese database Victor Gevers found online was not just a collection of old personal details. The database Gevers found appears to have been recording people’s movements tracked by facial recognition technology, he said, logging more than 6.7 million co-ordinates in a span of 24 hours. Gevers found that SenseNets, a Chinese facial recognition company, had left the database unprotected for months, exposing people’s addresses, government ID numbers and more. Joseph Atick, a pioneer in facial recognition technology, said that facial recognition products can use algorithms to recognize and track people in a crowd, but that privacy regulations in Europe, for example, make it much harder to launch a wide-scale application such as that of SenseNet. In recent years, NetPosa has been buying stakes in American surveillance startups such as Knightscope, a security robot maker.

Source: National Post February 19, 2019 07:07 UTC