With a relevant photo and a pair of glasses, you can unlock the face recognition system of 19 mainland brands of Android phones.
A recent study found that the face recognition systems of several mainland cell phones and applications are extremely easy to crack, and even bank accounts can be opened under false names easily. Nowadays, the Chinese Communist Party has implemented face recognition technology in various fields on the mainland, and the motives behind its surveillance and personal information security have been raising concerns.
Recently, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Tsinghua University on the mainland found in a face recognition study that it was possible to unlock the face recognition system of 19 mainland brands of Android phones with a relevant photo and a pair of glasses.
The research team printed out the eye area pattern of the relevant person’s photo, cut it out and pasted it on the frame of the glasses, and the tester put on the glasses and faced the tested phone, that is, it could be unlocked, and it only took about 15 minutes before and after.
The team said it could also unlock more than a dozen financial and government service mobile applications, and could even impersonate cell phone users to complete a bank account online.
The team said only the iPhone 11 could not be cracked in this way. But in fact, the CCP has required mainland cell phone users to undergo facial recognition when registering for new cell phone services since Dec. 1, 2019.
The Chinese Communist Party claims this requirement is to “maintain cybersecurity”. And Jeffrey Ding, a Chinese artificial intelligence researcher at Oxford University, says “another possible motivation is for the government to be able to better track users and centrally monitor each user’s phone, which is at least what the authorities intend to do now.”
Today, face recognition is extremely common on the mainland, spreading across cell phones, homes, high-speed trains, airports and other areas, and people on the mainland are calling themselves the “age of the face,” but are also concerned that personal privacy and security are being threatened.
In 2020, news broke out that the mainland’s Taobao, Idle Fish and other e-commerce platforms, as well as WeChat, qq group, someone cheap batches of mainland people selling face information, with the corresponding ID information.
And cameras are all over the mainland. 170 million surveillance cameras were installed across the country in 2017, and the number of surveillance cameras installed from 2017 to 2020 will grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 50%, a rate higher than the global average growth rate.
In 2019 the mainland had reported that only a photo was needed to crack the mainland’s face recognition system. A primary school student in Zhejiang used a printed photo instead of a real person’s face to unlock a community container used to collect consignments.
Last year there was a homeowner in Guangxi who gave a face swipe to a real estate agent before selling his house and then found his house was inexplicably transferred to someone else.
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