On February 8, 2021, Chinese authorities blocked Clubhouse, a social networking platform for voices, which had earlier become a global hit and was used by many people to discuss topics considered taboo by Chinese authorities, including the June 4 Incident and Hong Kong‘s anti-revision laws.
Q: We introduced the world-famous Clubhouse in last week’s Wall Quiz, mentioning that its technology is based on Agora technology and the problems that can arise from it. During the recent period, there have been many people in Clubhouse talking about sensitive topics such as Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and even conversations between Uyghurs, Taiwanese and Hong Kong people and Chinese people, breaking a lot of official lies. The Chinese government saw the situation and blocked Clubhouse, but there was a problem – Clubhouse is played anonymously, so could the Chinese authorities identify the people involved in the discussion and settle the score later?
Li Jianjun: In the past, before there was voice authentication technology, it was theoretically safe to speak anonymously on a platform like Clubhouse, where only voices were heard, but now there is voice authentication technology. Voice print authentication technology, is based on the structure of each person’s vocal cords, as well as speaking habits are different, and cause differences in the pattern of sound, this difference may not be detected by the average person with the ear, but the computer analysis can be accurately derived from the relevant laws. Therefore, voiceprint has been one of the biometric authentication methods adopted by banks and other institutions. In the United States, a bank in Hong Kong introduced voiceprint authentication in its telephone banking system. Customers with voiceprint authentication can call the customer hotline and complete the authentication without entering their password or even bank account number, as long as they start a conversation with a bank employee. When the voice print and fingerprint can play a similar role, you can imagine how scary it is if it is applied to track the identity of Clubhouse users.
China has a real-name phone system, and social platforms such as WeChat, which are widely used by the Chinese, are also “inextricably linked” to the authorities. The Chinese government can intercept all phone conversations of the Chinese population and build a huge database of voiceprints without the user being aware of it. Of course, such a database for China’s hundreds of millions of people would be very costly and may not be possible anytime soon, but the Chinese government does have more than enough resources to build a database of dissidents or specific groups. Therefore, in the case of Clubhouse, the Chinese government could theoretically compare the information obtained on the VoiceNet with its own voice print database and identify the relevant speakers. A good platform like Clubhouse, which could have facilitated dialogue among political dissidents, is now being brutally blocked by the Chinese government, and may also expose the speakers to considerable security risks.
Q: If participants change their voices through voice changers first, can they be safe to speak on Clubhouse or similar software?
Li Jianjun: If there was no computer technology to analyze the voice pattern, basically the voice changer is enough to ensure the safety of the person, the voice changer is also the usual technology to protect the safety of interviewees in news organizations. However, it is likely to have a relatively complex voice changer to protect the safety of the interviewee, because the simple voice changer, many times only change the tone of the speech, but did not change the relevant laws and registers, and to protect the safety of the speaker, the voice pattern must be distorted to a degree that the voice authentication software can not be analyzed, which is difficult to do with the general voice changer.
Here we can provide a relatively safe practice, is to speak first in the form of text input computer, and then read out by the computer. Through this practice, the voice is a machine voice, as the voice of Siri Apple hardware. Since there are tens of millions of Siri hardware around the world, this machine voice, it becomes the security of the speaker. Only this voice lacks emotion, which is quite an inexorable approach.
Q: There are Chinese technology companies intend to launch software similar to Clubhouse. Will this type of copycat software cause a similar shock to Clubhouse in China?
Li Jianjun: Even if a Chinese company’s Clubhouse software is technically copied to the exact same level, it is unlikely to create the same sensation as Clubhouse. On the one hand, the rise of Clubhouse relied heavily on the support of many American and Japanese celebrities to create such a big buzz. On the other hand, the success of Clubhouse depends on the free environment that Clubhouse relies on, i.e., the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. The success of Clubhouse lies in the fact that it is an unrestricted and unrestricted way to promote itself.
Clubhouse’s success lies in an environment where people can speak their minds freely, but as long as China’s political system does not change and the Communist Party continues its one-party dictatorship, stifling freedom of speech, even the freedom of speech that Hong Kong has, it will be impossible to replicate Clubhouse’s type of software, just as many Chinese video services that copy YouTube cannot challenge YouTube’s status.
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