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The issue of importing human rights to the digital sphere, especially in the context of state surveillance, has elicited extensive debate. China's social credit system is the epitome of the disastrous consequences of technological advancement without a commensurate commitment to human rights.
This system surveils every online and offline action of Chinese citizens, and increases or decreases their score based on 'desirability' of these actions. Buying books, for example, would increase one's score while criticising the government on social media would decrease it. These points determine an individual's access to facilities such as priority medical care, travel tickets, internet speeds, investment opportunities etc. The program aims to " allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere...while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step", through " algorithmic governance ".

The first casualty under the social credit system is the right to privacy. China's Constitution preserves " privacy of correspondence" ( Art.40), but scores for all 1.4 billion citizens compiled using public and private data will be made publicly available by 2020. The scheme is mandatory for all citizens - there is no opt-in or consent for data collection and end use. Private companies share user data with each other and with the government, as is evident from applications like the 'Deadbeat Map' which show details of any person on the government blacklist within 500 metres of a user, and allow reporting on social media. The volume of data being collected and stored also increases the risk of hacking of personal information, especially since China does not impose any security or reporting standards on data collection agencies.

Freedom of speech embodied in the Chinese Constitution ( Art.35) is also being flouted, with financial and travel restrictions being placed on dissidents. Freedom of movement is not constitutionally guaranteed, and the social credit system has led to widespread imposition of travel bans on blacklisted individuals. Chinahas also turned the concept of sanctity of family units ( Art.49) on its head, by making benefits available to children contingent on their parents' scores.

Furthermore, there is no codification of what constitutes 'undesirable' behaviour, or of points assigned to different actions. There is no distinction between civil and criminal wrongs, and sanctions are being imposed for objectionable behaviour demonstrated before the system was implemented. Different municipalities also employ varying criteria and scales for calculation of points, affecting entitlement of citizens to the same benefits. Sanctions are imposed without following principles of natural justice or conducting a trial, and there is no mechanism to appeal, or be removed from the blacklist.

So how is the Chinese government justifying this digital dictatorship? China has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1976 with reservations, and has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1976 despite signing it. It has also strongly opposed the Universal Declaration on Human Rights 1948. Its Constitution in Arts. 40, 51, 53 and 54 embodies several limitations on human rights, ranging from run-of-the-mill restrictions for national security and public order to broad, unique ones such as " interests of the State" and " honour and interests of the motherland", which can be utilised to validate the social credit system. An argument floated in other jurisdictions that China may also rely on is that the right to privacy can be waived, but the system's mandatory nature seems to assume automatic waiver.

It may be argued that despite China's non-engagement with international treaties, the right to privacy and freedom of expression would be binding on it, having acquired the status of customary international law. Art.19(3) of the ICCPR allows restrictions on free speech in very limited circumstances. It has also been suggested that only necessary and least intrusive limitations should be enacted, and a credit system based on constant surveillance and arbitrary sanction flouts this criterion. Such restrictions are not even envisaged for the right against arbitrary interference with privacy.

However, China presents another policy stand for defying even customary international law. China's distaste for the UDHR stems from its 'universal' nature - it has continually emphasised each state's right to implement its own social system and development path, and the duty of others to 'respect' socio-political differences. Using this approach, China seeks to circumvent even universally binding aspects of international law.

Hence, in China, broad exceptions to fundamental rights, a distaste for universal rights and an inactive judicial system combine to facilitate arbitrary government action, thereby dampening the essence of human rights law and providing a frightening foundation to draconian measures like the social credit system.

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The Human Rights Implications of China's Social Credit System

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The issue of importing human rights to the digital sphere, especially in the context of state surveillance, has elicited extensive debate. China's social credit system is the epitome of the disastrous consequences of technological advancement without a commensurate commitment to human rights.

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In June 2016, Ruzunsa Memettohti, a Uighur Muslim who has lived in Turkey for two decades, called her younger sister Patem in Karakax, a county in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, to chat about a parcel of clothes she had sent her.

After their conversation Patem vanished, as did Ms Memettohti's other relatives living in Xinjiang. "I kept calling but nobody picked up," said Ms Memettohti, speaking at her home in Istanbul.

Clues have finally emerged about what had happened: 33-year-old Patem had been interned in a "re-education" camp, according to leaked Communist party records.

Patem is listed as entry 358, according to records dated March 7 2018. Next to her name features the reason for her internment: "Having one more child than allowed by family planning policies." One of Ms Memettohti's older sisters, a teacher, is also among the detainees. Her faults were "having a passport" and "too many children", the file reads.

The Karakax list appears to document the surveillance and imprisonment of hundreds of individuals from the Karakax region, where Turkic Uighur Muslims make up more than 90 per cent of the population.

Methodology: how the FT authenticated the Karakax list

The leaked records add to mounting evidence of the Chinese government's crackdown on Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, with more than a million people having been detained over the past three years.

The documents have come to light as the Chinese government is grappling to contain the coronavirus outbreak, with public anger at the bungled early response posing the greatest challenge yet to President Xi Jinping's authority. Uighur exiles worry that the disease could spread quickly among people detained because of the dire living conditions and a lack of medical care in the camps in a region that has reported 75 cases of infection and one death so far.

The leaked list also contradicts Beijing's claims that its "re-education" programmes in Xinjiang are voluntary and target violent extremists. Justifications for imprisonment include praying at home, keeping in touch with relatives overseas and having more children than allotted by the state.

The Xinjiang system was "charging people on the basis of arbitrary definitions that turn religious piety into violations", said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado.

The files detail how individuals move through the mass detention system, from initial evaluation and surveillance, to internment and "graduation" - the term used for their release into "monitoring and control" at home or involuntary labour in industrial parks.

"I still cannot believe it," Ms Memettohti told the Financial Times when she found out about Patem's fate. "She is a really sharp woman who was always good at protecting herself. She was always keeping herself away from problems."

She does not know what has happened to her sisters' children, and fears they may be in government-run de facto orphanages.

A view of the system

The 137-page file contains personal data on more than 300 individuals in Karakax with relatives abroad. The Chinese government has flagged "people who leave the country and do not return" as a security risk in Xinjiang because of their possible ties to exile groups deemed "separatists" by Beijing.

Details about family members, social circles and religious beliefs, as well as perceived misdemeanours, are also in the file.

In Patem's case, the list records she has a married older sister living in Turkey - Ms Memettohti. "[Patem] has not contacted her . . . The individual does not pose an actual threat to society. Recommend graduation. Manage and control in the community," it states.

The purpose of the file appears to be to record judgments on whether an individual should remain in one of four camps in the county or be moved to another part of the system. In some entries, the word "agree" was written beside a judgment, suggesting the files were used by government officials to communicate and approve decisions.

The records appear to have been updated multiple times from early 2017 to early 2019. In some cases, the same people are listed repeatedly, showing a series of judgments, with the final verdict often being "graduation".

From the list

By early 2019, most of the individuals on the list had been allowed to leave the camps, the records show. However, Uighur activists outside China say they are still unable to contact relatives in the country.

Former detainees "have no choice about where to work and know they are always watched very closely. [They] are understood to be on probation, where they could be sent back to a camp," Mr Byler said.

The county's two largest facilities were in industrial parks on the outskirts of Kalakashizen, a town in Karakax. In Karakax last month, one camp location appeared to be empty. Another had been used by the government for propaganda tours.

In one location, the FT observed four public buses that appeared to come from a camp as they dropped off a group of working-age Uighurs at a textiles factory. Police barred the FT from approaching both facilities. Satellite imagery analysed by the FT suggests that the industrial parks have expanded rapidly in recent years.

The system in Xinjiang is fuelled by "endless cycles of suspicion by association", said Adrian Zenz, a China expert at non-profit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who received the documents and vetted their authenticity.

The goal, he said, was "to eliminate risk by achieving complete state control over individuals, families, communities and regions".

China's foreign ministry and the Xinjiang government did not respond to requests for comment.

Late last year, two caches of Communist party documents, published by the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, revealed that top Xinjiang officials ordered the camps to be run like prisons.

From the list

Population control and piety

The Karakax list's most commonly cited reason for interning members of minority communities is violation of family planning policies - China's strict rules governing the number of children each family can have.

Being a practising Muslim is the second most common reason. Possession of "illegal" religious videos or books can result in imprisonment, as well as going on hajj - the pilgrimage to Mecca - wearing a veil or closing a restaurant during Ramadan.

China's leading demographers have characterised birth rates among Uighurs as too high. In 2017, Li Xiaoxia, an academic at state think-tank Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, wrote that Uighurs "had been influenced by religious extremism or parochial nationalism to violate policy and have more children".

"Alongside trying to rewire those who have already been born, you try and prevent more births overall," said James Leibold, an expert on China's ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Birth rates in Hotan, the region of southern Xinjiang that includes Karakax, have dropped steeply from more than 20 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2016 to under 9 per 1,000 in 2018, according to official data.

A 2018 Karakax government report stressed its "maximally strict family planning policies".

From the list

Community surveillance

Since taking office in 2016, Xinjiang's Communist party boss Chen Quanguo, the main architect of the region's internment system, has beefed up methods of surveillance and social control in Xinjiang by dividing each residential area into communities of a few thousand people with dedicated police and officials in charge of "social stability".

Much of the decision-making over internment is left to these junior party officials, the Karakax documents show.

Mr Chen first developed these methods during a five-year stint in Tibet, where he oversaw a rollout of strict new security measures to curb religious freedoms. He expanded the use of village "work units", or small groups of officials tasked with keeping tabs on residents in their area.

"It's much more human labour-intensive than often thought. Even though it relies to a degree on technology, there is also this laborious process of digging up little crimes," said Mr Zenz.

More than 4,000km away in Istanbul, Ms Memettohti says she thinks of her sisters and their family "every single day". "I pray to God to keep them safe and maintain their faith."

Reasons for internment in the Karakax list
Produced by Adrienne Klasa

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The Karakax list: how China targets Uighurs in Xinjiang

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In June 2016, Ruzunsa Memettohti, a Uighur Muslim who has lived in Turkey for two decades, called her younger sister Patem in Karakax, a county in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, to chat about a parcel of clothes she had sent her. After their conversation Patem vanished, as did Ms Memettohti's other relatives living in Xinjiang.

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The Chinese government is pushing some of its biggest tech companies-including Tencent, Weibo and a unit of Alibaba-to offer the state a stake in them and a direct role in corporate decisions.

Wary of the increasing power of private businesses, internet regulators have discussed taking 1% stakes with social-media powers Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Weibo Corp. and with Youku Tudou, a YouTube-like video platform owned by e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., according to people close to the companies.

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Beijing Pushes for a Direct Hand in China's Big Tech Firms

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The Chinese government is pushing some of its biggest tech companies-including Tencent, Weibo and a unit of Alibaba-to offer the state a stake in them and a direct role in corporate decisions. Wary of the increasing power of private businesses, internet regulators have discussed taking 1% stakes with social-media powers Tencent Holdings Ltd.

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Megvii Inc., a facial recognition development startup also known as Face++, raised about $460 million from the Russia-Chinese Investment Fund (which is backed by those countries' sovereign wealth funds), Jack Ma's Ant Financial, and SK Group, reports Bloomberg. With the massive infusion of funding, it's now valued at at at least $1 billion. The startup's technology has some powerful information at its disposal- "facial scans held in a Ministry of Public Security database drawn from legal identification files on about 1.3 billion Chinese."

Read the full story here.

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Megvii, Chinese facial recognition startup with access to government database, raises $460 million

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Megvii Inc., a facial recognition development startup also known as Face++, raised about $460 million from the Russia-Chinese Investment Fund (which is backed by those countries' sovereign wealth funds), Jack Ma's Ant Financial, and SK Group, reports Bloomberg. With the massive infusion of funding, it's now valued at at at least $1 billion.

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HEFEI, China At January's CES extravaganza in Las Vegas, Chinese artificial intelligence company iFlytek for the first time had its own booth, where curious crowds checked out its AI translation systems and other technology.

The company's purpose was clear.

"The time has come for artificial intelligence technology to be used in real life," iFlytek Chairman Liu Qingfeng said on Jan. 9 as he unveiled the company's partnership with U.S. technology company Nvidia. "Given that we have received tie-up proposals from more than 100 companies in the world, the time is ripe for us to look beyond our borders."

IFlytek is China's leading voice recognition tech company, with a more than 70% market share. Still, less than 1% of its sales come from overseas. The company wants to change that.

In recent years, iFlytek has been making inroads into overseas markets. It has opened an office in Silicon Valley, sought partnerships with foreign automakers and collaborated with global tech conglomerates.

Last summer, iFlytek began attracting attention outside China after it ranked sixth in the "50 Smartest Companies 2017" list from MIT Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The company's ranking was higher than that of China's top three internet companies, Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, whose market capitalizations -- at $88 billion, $506 billion and $556 billion, respectively -- dwarf that of iFlytek's $13 billion.

IFlytek has fared well in comparison with its bigger peers. The value of the company more than doubled in 2017, a year in which the benchmark Shenzhen Composite Index dropped 3.5%.

And the market remains bullish on its outlook. In a research note, Eric Qiu and Ronnie Ho, analysts at CCB International, said the company "has headroom for growth as it has carved out a niche in a burgeoning new area of technology that has applicability in a vast array of industries." The note maintained an "outperform" rating with a target price of 66 yuan, 9% higher than iFlytek's closing price on Jan. 25.

The appetite for iFlytek among global investors is reflected in the heavy buying of its shares on the stock-connect program between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, where the company's stock is listed. Hong Kong Securities Clearing was the fifth-largest shareholder, with a 1.32% ownership as of last September. The latest update by the Hong Kong exchange indicates that its holding had risen to 1.5% as of Jan. 25.

IFlytek's ambitions are evident at the company's headquarters in Hefei, Anhui Province.

The lobby displays a sign that reads, "Develop high technology and realize industrialization." The slogan comes from government's "863 Program" introduced in March 1986, and is based on calligraphy originally written by then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

The building's second floor has photographs of iFlytek's top executives together with current government leaders, including President Xi Jinping and Vice Premier Wang Yang.

STRONG BEGINNINGS The company was founded in 1999 by 18 graduate students and alumni of the University of Science and Technology of China.

The leader of this group was Liu, the current chairman. When he was a graduate student developing an expertise in voice recognition, Liu consulted his mentor, professor Wang Renhua, about starting the company.

Wang fully backed Liu, and the professor today is considered the "father of iFlytek." Wang remains the company's fourth-largest shareholder as of September.

Shortly after gaining Wang's support, the company became eligible to receive government support under the 863 Program, including 1.5 million yuan ($237,000 at the current exchange rate) in research and development funding. This backing also boosted the company's credibility, opening up new business relations with government agencies and corporations.

An example is a deal struck in 2000 with telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei Technologies. IFlytek developed a system for call-center operators and jointly worked with Huawei in securing clients.

By 2001, the number of corporate clients using iFlytek's voice recognition technology exceeded 100 and it started receiving funds from Lenovo Group's investment unit. IFlytek also has launched a series of joint development projects with universities and research institutes.

USTC was established in Beijing in 1958 but was moved out of the capital during the Cultural Revolution, when education, science and intellectual values as a whole were under attack. It eventually found a home in Hefei, an inland city in eastern China.

The university boasts a number of graduates who have become scientists or founders of tech companies. Zhang Yaqin, its most prominent graduate, entered the university at age 12, earning bachelor's and master's degrees. (He completed his Ph.D. at The George Washington University at 23.) Zhang served as the chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group and now is president of Baidu. Lenovo Group CEO Yang Yuanqing also studied at USTC's graduate school.

BIG CONNECTIONS The roughly 3,000 employees at iFlytek's headquarters have an average age of 27, and 60% are engineers who majored in cutting-edge technologies at USTC or other science-focused universities.

The company also has won recognition around the world. At the 11th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation in the U.S. in 2014, iFlytek took first place in English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation technology, beating top-level universities and research institutions, including MIT and Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. It also ranked No. 1 in a machine translation contest hosted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. in 2015.

Most voice recognition services by iFlytek are provided through the internet, and these systems understand text by using AI and big data analysis.

In addition to Mandarin, voice recognition services are available in regional Chinese dialects, including Cantonese and Shanghainese, and the company says it has achieved an accuracy level of more than 95%. The number of smartphones and other devices using iFlytek's voice recognition technology has exceeded 1.2 billion.

IFlytek's client list includes many prominent Chinese companies. In addition to internet conglomerates Tencent, Alibaba and JD.com, its telecom customers include China Mobile -- the largest shareholder in iFlytek, with a 12.9% stake as of September -- China Unicom and China Telecom, which use iFlytek's technology in their call-center operations.

Other clients include smartphone makers Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo and ZTE; consumer electronics makers Haier, TCL, Hisense and Skyworth; insurance companies People's Insurance Company of China and Ping An Insurance (Group); and banks, including Bank of China (BOC), Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB) and Bank of Communications.

IFlytek's long client list allows it to access enormous amounts of data, and its collaborative relationships with the Chinese government and the Communist Party help it further improve its technological strength.

In November, the Chinese government set up a special task force to promote its next-generation AI development plan and appointed iFlytek to take the lead in the advancement of voice recognition technological applications. The company also set up an industry alliance with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to support AI-related startups.

SECURITY CONCERNS According to Chinese media, iFlytek AI has been used in criminal investigations, indictments and trials through work with more than 400 courts and 200 prosecutor's offices around China. AI has been used in language analysis in Sichuan Province, the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

In an open letter dated Aug. 2 and addressed to Chairman Liu, Arvind Ganesan, director of Human Rights Watch's business and human rights division, requested details of the company's "mass automated voice recognition and monitoring system," a pilot program to monitor phone conversations, its "business relationship" with the Ministry of Public Security, and its human rights policies. In an October report, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said iFlytek had not responded. Liu is a member of the National People's Congress, a rubber stamp legislature but one that carries prestige and influence in the country.

Speaking with the Nikkei Asian Review at the CES event, Hu Yu, iFlytek's executive president, acknowledged its work with the government.

"As a Chinese company, one of our customers is the Chinese government," Hu said, adding that the company "cannot decide" on how its technology is used. "Apple also sells its products to the U.S. military."

"What we can do is to provide our technology," Hu said. "Our customers will decide how to do that. We have some relationship with them in national projects, but we are not in charge of that."

IFlytek invests about 25% of its sales into R&D, which is the primary focus of its overseas businesses. In 2016, it opened an office in Silicon Valley. It has also started a joint study with the Georgia Institute of Technology, though the details have not been fully disclosed.

Before teaming with Nvidia, iFlytek had already been accelerating the development of its voice recognition technology in collaboration with IBM and Intel. Its voice recognition technology is now available in English, Japanese, Spanish, French and Korean.

In the auto industry, iFlytek has formed partnerships with Toyota Motor, Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen, but these deals are primarily for car navigation systems for vehicles sold in China. It now is considering seeking tie-ups for systems in cars sold globally.

The company's presence in China is evident, but it is a different story outside the country. Google, Microsoft and Apple are the global leaders in voice recognition technology, while iFlytek's market share has yet to reach double digits.

Unlike at home, iFlytek is not able to receive any preferential treatment and support from foreign governments. In addition, many overseas clients remain cautious about Chinese companies.

At iFlytek's headquarters, another sign is displayed prominently: "Let the world hear our voices."

Whether those voices are heard abroad will be the real test of iFlytek's strength.
Nikkei staff writer Kim Jaewon in Las Vegas contributed to this story.

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Company in focus: China's leader in voice recognition AI goes global

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HEFEI, China At January's CES extravaganza in Las Vegas, Chinese artificial intelligence company iFlytek for the first time had its own booth, where curious crowds checked out its AI translation systems and other technology. The company's purpose was clear. "The time has come for artificial intelligence technology to be used in real life," iFlytek Chairman Liu Qingfeng said on Jan.

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China's social credit system has been compared to Black Mirror, Big Brother and every other dystopian future sci-fi writers can think up. The reality is more complicated - and in some ways, worse.

The idea for social credit came about back in 2007, with projects announced by the government as an opt-in system in 2014. But there's a difference between the official government system and private, corporate versions, though the latter's scoring system that includes shopping habits and friendships is often conflated with the former.

Brits are well accustomed to credit checks: data brokers such as Experian trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that's used by lenders and mortgage providers. We also have social-style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, while Uber drivers and passengers both rate each other; if your score falls too far, you're out of luck.

China's social credit system expands that idea to all aspects of life, judging citizens' behaviour and trustworthiness. Caught jaywalking, don't pay a court bill, play your music too loud on the train - you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket. "The idea itself is not a Chinese phenomenon," says Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Nor is the use, and abuse, of aggregated data for analysis of behaviour. "But if [the Chinese system] does come together as envisioned, it would still be something very unique," she says. "It's both unique and part of a global trend."

What is China's social credit system?

Unveiled in a 2014 plan, pieces of the system are already in place, and the Chinese government appears to be targeting a 2020 goal to get the rest in place, though that's less a deadline and instead marks the end of a planning period, says Samantha Hoffman, non-resident fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As yet, there's no one social credit system. Instead, local governments have their own social record systems that work differently, while unofficial private versions are operated at companies such Ant Financial's Zhima Credit, better known as Sesame Credit. Ant Financial is the payment firm spun out of Alibaba. The systems use shopping habits among other data to inform credit-style scores, on an opt-in basis. "There is no single, nationally coordinated system," Ohlberg says. And the pilots that do exist don't all work in the same way.

The private systems, including Ant Financial's Sesame Credit, often get conflated with the government plans, though they aren't part of the official system. To be a bit more confusing, the data collected by private companies is expected to be hoovered up by the government in the future, and some of the data is already used in government trials. Sesame Credit says this is only with user consent.

That leads to misunderstanding of what the social credit system actually is, notes Ohlberg. "What happened is some of the media took the private pilots, like Sesame Credit... and presented it as the social credit system," she says. It's not officially part of the system, and doesn't have a license; though the pilot is approved, and indeed encouraged, it could one day be shut down by the government. "It kind of rides on the fashion for social credit."

What's troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings - which is already happening with some pilots, she says. "You'll have sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens," Ohlberg adds. That's a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it's analysed to spit out a score or ranking, though Sesame does share some details about what types of data is used.

How does the social credit system work?

The target, eventually, is that the government system will be country wide, with businesses given a "unified social credit code" and citizens an identity number, all linked to permanent record. "If you go to a credit China website, and you have an entity's credit code, you can type that in and pull up credit records," explains Hoffman. "Individuals will have ID-linked codes." It's less a score, she says, and more of a record.

Some reports talk about a blacklist; that's part of the official government social credit system, which means if you owe the government money, for example, you could lose certain rights. There's a difference between getting a low social credit score and being blacklisted by the government, such as for refusing to pay a fine.

The criteria that go into a social credit ranking depends on where you are, notes Ohlberg. "It's according to which place you're in, because they have their own catalogs," she says. It can range from not paying fines when you're deemed fully able to, misbehaving on a train, standing up a taxi, or driving through a red light.

One city, Rongcheng, gives all residents 1,000 points to start. Authorities make deductions for bad behaviour like traffic violations, and add points for good behaviour such as donating to charity. One regulation Ohlberg recently read specifically addresses stealing electricity. Of course, you'll have to get caught first or be reported by someone else. While facial recognition is infamously used to spot jaywalkers, in some cities it's not so automated, Ohlberg notes.

Private projects, such as Sesame Credit, hoover up all sorts of data on its 400 million customers, from how much time they spend playing video games (that's bad) to whether they're a parent (that's good). That can be shared with other companies. One infamous example is Sesame Credit linking up with the Baihe dating site, so would be partners can judge each other on their looks as well as their social credit score; that system is opt-in.

So far, taking part in both the private and government versions is technically voluntary; in the future, the official social credit system will be mandatory. That said, there's plenty of pressure to take part now. "There are incentives for participating, and disincentives for not participating," Hoffman notes.

What happens if you're blacklisted?

Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined - and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

What recourse is there? With the government system, if you want to be removed from a blacklist, you can either pay your bill or appeal to the court, says Jing Zeng, a researcher at the University of Zurich. "Bring your money to the court and then you get removed from the system," she says. "It's not a judicial system by itself, it's still the court you need to [appeal to]."

However, the Chinese justice system leaves much to be desired, says Hoffman. "There are no genuine protections for the people and entities subject to the system," she says.

"In China there is no such thing as the rule of law. Regulations that can be largely apolitical on the surface can be political when the Communist Party of China (CCP) decides to use them for political purposes." In April 2018, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) sent letters to international airlines demanding they show Taiwan as part of China, saying the government would "make a record of your company's serious dishonesty and take disciplinary actions" for any that didn't comply; they all eventually did. The system used to pressure the airlines was a pilot of the Civil Aviation Industry Credit Measures, which is part of the official social credit system.

Alongside the potential for abuse of power, the knock-on effects of statewide surveillance, and the likelihood of incorrect data, Ohlberg notes the a few bad marks on a social credit record could spark a negative spiral.

While it varies by programme, in some local pilots a positive rating means discounts and benefits, such as a simplified process with bureaucracies. If you have a low rating, you may have extra paperwork or fees. "Once you're in a low category, it makes it difficult," she says. "I see a huge potential for negative spiral." Such a system could further divide society, creating classes of people depending on their social credit - and this is where comparisons to Black Mirror pop up.

Why is China building this?

It's all about building trust, says the Chinese government. The 2014 document describing the government's plans note that as "trust-keeping is insufficiently rewarded, the costs of breaking trust tend to be low."

And Chinese society does have trust issues, says Ohlberg, be it food quality scandal, pollution, or employees not paying their workers. "But the system can also be used to enforce vague laws like endangering national security or unity," she adds. Zeng says that can include food safety and product quality, major problems in the country. "It's a big problem in Chinese society," she says. "They are punishing companies for this kind of bad behaviour."

Plus, it could help build alternative means of financial credit, says Ohlberg, as many people in China live outside financial systems, so have no trustworthy credit rating. "Some of the earlier pilots of the social credit system that preceded the major policy plan that was published in 2014, were actually building a social credit system for the countryside," she says. "The majority of people there wouldn't have financial banking data on them." For businesses, a social credit system could also be used for micro enterprises, which couldn't be assessed with traditional criteria.

Hoffman isn't buying that argument, saying such a system is about government power. "If solving problems was the real goal, the CCP would not need social credit to do it," she says. "China's social credit system is a state-driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party's power."

She adds that social credit is a tech-enabled way to tie political power to social and economic development that's been discussed in the country since the 1980s, an automation of Chairman Mao's Mass Line - a term to describe how the party's leadership shaped and managed society. "In Mao's China, the Mass Line relied on ideological mass mobilisation, using Mao Zedong's personal charisma, to force participation," Hoffman says. "The CCP could no longer, after the Mao era, rely on ideological mobilisation as the primary tool for operationalising social management."

Is there more than social credit?

China's social credit scheme is developing, but it is only one part of the country's surveillance state. As well as tight controls on the web content which is available, through the country's national firewall, there is monitoring and censorship of social media.

Ahead of the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that critical posts on the social networks of Weibo and Wechat were removed. Leading video platforms also all simultaneously turned off comments saying system upgrades were needed. There have also been crackdowns on the use of VPNs, which can help protect people's privacy online.

The country has developed advanced facial recognition systems that are able to follow people across entire cities. In a show of power at the end of 2017, Chinese officials working in co-operation with BBC News showed how it could track down and find one of the organisation's reporters within seven minutes. The movements of journalist John Sudworth were monitored as the country's network of 170 million CCTV cameras was leveraged to follow him.

More worryingly, the region of Xinjiang, in the north west of the country has become a test bed for China's vast digital control operations. In particular, the largely Muslim minority of Uighur people has been subjected to increased surveillance and discrimination. It has been uncovered that more than 500,000 face scans of Uighurs have been conducted.

What does this mean for China?

The full extent of the impact on social credit to Chinese citizens is impossible to say, simply because the system doesn't fully exist yet. Zeng suggests the reality is somewhere between the government's claims and the Western media's description of horror-filled dystopias. "It's a very like a baby step," she said of the work that's happened so far.

Ohlberg agrees that early reporting had multiple errors that led to misunderstandings of the system - but that doesn't mean social credit isn't dangerous. "It's somewhere between the people who say the media coverage is inaccurate and that means it's not so bad and the people who see this huge dystopia," she says. "You have to find this space between that were you can explain it is actually quite scary, even if it's not quite the way it's portrayed."

Because of that, no other country should be considering this idea, says Hoffman. "The west should not copy any aspect of social credit," Hoffman says. "Often comparisons are drawn between private applications like Uber and its rating system for customers and drivers. While these private company systems are extremely problematic in my view, they are fundamentally different. The People's Republic of China is an authoritarian country, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for gross human rights violations for decades- just look at the example of Xinjiang now. There is nothing any liberal democratic society should even think about copying in the social credit system."
Updated 24.01.19, 11:20 GMT: Alibaba does not own Ant Financial's Sesame Credit system.

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The complicated truth about China's social credit system

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China's social credit system isn't a world first but when it's complete it will be unique. The system isn't just as simple as everyone being given a score though

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China's most popular messaging app, WeChat, has always had a close relationship with the Chinese government. The app has been subsidized by the government since its creation in 2011, and it's an accepted reality that officials censor and monitor users. Now, WeChat is poised to take on an even greater role: an initiative is underway to integrate WeChat with China's electronic ID system.

It may be hard for people outside of China to grasp just how influential WeChat has become there. "For all intents and purposes WeChat is your phone, and to a far greater extent in China than anywhere else, your phone is everything," wrote Ben Thompson, analyst and founder of the blog Stratechery. "There is nothing in any other country that is comparable: not LINE, not WhatsApp, not Facebook."

Founded in 2011 and owned by Tencent, WeChat has 902 million daily users, and about 38 billion messages are sent on the platform every day. Last year, Tencent added mini-apps to WeChat, creating an app store of sorts: inside WeChat, you can play games, pay bills, find local hangouts, book doctor appointments, file police reports, hail taxis, hold video conferences, and access bank services. State-run media and government agencies also have official WeChat accounts, where they can directly communicate with users. (Tencent is a content partner of The Verge in China.) WeChat's dominance is aided by the government, which has censored Facebook Messenger since 2009, blocked the South Korean-owned Line app in 2015, and banned WhatsApp last year.

"WeChat becomes harder and harder for its users to opt out," says Yuhua Wang, a former Shanghai resident who wrote a piece called "How WeChat grows into a huge part of our life," for USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Overseas Chinese or anyone with family or relationships in China tend to download the messaging app in order to stay in contact since other American apps are banned.

WeChat's transition to an electronic ID system is a "predictable evolution"

Now WeChat is poised to become China's electronic ID system, state-run Xinhua reported in December. WeChat will issue virtual ID cards, which individuals would use in lieu of physical state-issued ID cards. Since WeChat requires users to register with their real names per government policy, it's not a stretch to imagine that one day, WeChat may fully replace state IDs. Harvard Business School professor of management Willy Shih, who co-authored a case study on WeChat, calls the transition to an electronic ID system a "predictable evolution."

The pilot program began at the end of December, and it expanded across the country in January. The program was developed by the research institute of the Ministry of Public Security and Tencent's WeChat team and is backed by banks and other government departments, including the China Construction Bank and the Guangzhou police station's Nansha District branch.

To enroll in the program, users open the mini-app within WeChat to apply for a certificate. WeChat then gives you a digital black-and-white ID card that works for more informal uses like registering at internet cafes. ( In China, you're required to provide ID to log on.) Users can also apply to upgrade to a colored ID card. These can be used for more formal banking transactions and registering a business. Users can protect their IDs by setting an eight-digit password, and Xinhua says that facial recognition technology will be used to verify applicants in person before their ID cards are authorized in order to deter identity fraud. Additionally, the app will log a person's fingerprint and the card chip from their corresponding physical ID.

Xinhua says that the digital IDs will be an "easy way to prove that 'it's really me' anywhere, at any time, without worrying about identity theft." WeChat users will, of course, still have to carry their phones, and they could still be vulnerable to identity theft if someone gains access to their phones. Tencent's WeChat department declined to comment. The Ministry of Public Security did not immediately respond.

China has experimented with electronic ID cards on a mobile app before. In 2016, Wuhan's Public Security Bureau in Hubei province partnered with Alibaba's mobile payment platform Alipay to launch a similar electronic ID system. In its first year, it was used by about 400,000 people in Wuhan, and further updates eventually allowed the app to become a viable ID replacement for many of the city's occupants. Alibaba declined to comment but said that the program is no longer running.

To some observers, WeChat's new role raises privacy concerns. In addition to WeChat's close ties with the Chinese government, WeChat also states in its privacy policy that it may retain user data for "as long as is necessary" to "comply with applicable laws and regulations." In a since-deleted social media post in January, WeChat denied that the app was storing user chats in response to businessman Li Shufu's comments that Tencent CEO Ma Huateng "must be watching all our WeChats every day."

Tencent scored a zero out of 100 for WeChat's lack of freedom of speech protection and end-to-end encryption

WeChat has a reputation for being heavily monitored, despite Tencent's attempts to convince users to "rest assured, respecting user privacy has always been one of WeChat's most important principles." But even if the company says otherwise, on a technical level, it doesn't offer users much protection against government surveillance. Tencent scored a zero out of 100 for WeChat's lack of freedom of speech protection and lack of end-to-end encryption in a 2016 Amnesty International report on user privacy. Tencent doesn't disclose when the government requests user data and gives no detail about the kind of encryption, if any, it employs.

Despite the privacy concerns, WeChat remains dominant. "In mainland China, it's very culturally ingrained that the government has access to your life essentially," says Matt Wright, director of emerging markets at AngelHack, a hackathon organization. "As long as you're not doing anything weird and plotting against the government, they're not going to dig through your data." Shih says the relative privacy protections between apps aren't important because the general expectation of privacy is so low: "It's not an issue over there because you don't have any privacy."

There are signs that consumers in China may be growing more sensitive to the possible consequences of state-enforced data collection. Whether it's enough to create an obstacle for WeChat's considerable advantage is an open question. WeChat's rise in China was aided by the censorship of foreign apps, government subsidies, and integration with government agencies. The app's next step, to become an actual government ID system, will further solidify it as China's official app.

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China's most popular messaging app, WeChat, has always had a close relationship with the Chinese government. The app has been subsidized by the government since its creation in 2011, and it's an accepted reality that officials censor and monitor users.

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China has blocked millions of "discredited" travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country's controversial "social credit" system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens.

According to the National Public Credit Information Centre, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018. Citizens placed on black lists for social credit offences were prevented from buying train tickets 5.5 million times. The report released last week said: "Once discredited, limited everywhere".

The social credit system aims to incentivise "trustworthy" behaviour through penalties as well as rewards. According to a government document about the system dating from 2014, the aim is to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."

Social credit offences range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information and taking drugs. More minor violations include using expired tickets, smoking on a train or not walking a dog on a leash.

Local governments and agencies have been piloting aspects of the system, which will eventually give every Chinese citizen a personalised score. Critics said authorities in China were using technology and big data to create an Orwellian state of mass surveillance and control.

Authorities have previously used blacklists to limit the travel of some citizens, but the social credit system appears to have expanded the practice. China's supreme court said in 2017 that 6.15 million citizens had been barred from taking flights because of social credit offences.

Last year, China's National Development and Reform Commission said it would begin banning people on public transport for up to a year. The recent report also said 128 people were prevented from leaving China because of unpaid taxes.

According to the report, other penalties for individuals include being barred from buying insurance, real estate or investment products. Companies on the blacklist are banned from bidding on projects or issuing corporate bonds.

The report said authorities collected more than 14m data points of "untrustworthy conduct" last year, including scams, unpaid loans, false advertising and occupying reserved seats on a train.

A video of a train passenger who refused to give up a seat another passenger had reserved went viral last year, sparking a debate over whether the current system of banning such travellers was harsh enough.

Officials believe the system is working. The report said 3.5 million people or companies paid taxes or debts they owed because of the social credit system.

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China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of 'social credit' system

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China has blocked millions of "discredited" travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country's controversial "social credit" system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens. According to the National Public Credit Information Centre, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018.

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China's top tech companies have often expressed willingness to share users' personal data with the state as part of a tacit bargain that allows them to expand with minimal regulatory interference. Several revelations this year have made it increasingly clear how networks of surveillance, reward, and punishment are sustained by partnerships between tech firms (both big and small) and Chinese courts, telephone service providers, and state security.

For instance, Keith Bradsher and Alan Tang of the New York Times have reported that the Chinese government is stepping up efforts to make blacklists of debtors publicly available online. Focusing on naming individuals with outstanding debt from loans, medical bills, and other missed payments, the blacklists come from the Supreme People's Court (SPC). The SPC shares these lists with the private social credit platform Sesame Credit, a product of Alibaba 's spin-off fintech firm Ant Financial. Publicizing individuals' names enables websites to block them from purchasing tickets for high-speed trains and flights until they repay. But Bradsher and Tang point out that the system is unlikely to target perennially indebted state-owned enterprises:

Chinese officials have ordered provincial governments to establish online platforms naming those who do not pay their obligations, official media reported this week. The lists should be maintained by local news organizations as well as courts and regulators, the report said, with an aim of exposing deadbeats and pressuring them to pay up.

The new effort is unlikely to affect big borrowers, like major state-owned companies and other big firms, whose debts are almost never called in. But it could intensify and centralize officials' broader moves to assign ratings to individuals based on creditworthiness and other criteria.

[...] Details of how Chinese officials would manage the online platforms were scant. The reports said that China's banking regulator, the Supreme Court and the propaganda arm of the Communist Party had told local officials to complete the platforms by the end of the year and to make the public aware of the websites within two years. [Source]

Another new form of targeted public shaming for debtors has arisen from collaboration between provincial governments and telecommunications companies. As Sixth Tone's Wang Lianzhang reported in June, courts in Dengfeng, Henan ordered that recorded messages be applied to blacklisted debtors' numbers, so that any caller would hear a message declaring that "the person you are calling is listed as dishonest by the Dengfeng People's Court. Please urge them to fulfill their obligations according to effective legal documents." Xinhua recently noted that this practice has been extended to Hubei, Jiangsu, Sichuan, and Zhejiang provinces.

Facial recognition is another front, with the Ministry of Public Security leading a drive to create a national database with the goal of making all of China's 1.3 billion citizens identifiable within three seconds by drawing upon their facial characteristics. Such systems are already quickly expanding into a range of arenas from airport security to shaming jaywalkers, and could feasibly be extended still further to domains including tracking debtors' travel patterns in the future. One indebted woman's efforts to dodge identification by undergoing plastic surgery may no longer be viable if this is the course China's AI-driven monitoring takes.

For now, South China Morning Post's Stephen Chen has remarked upon the only known scoring system that so far uses facial recognition:

Some other restaurants have even offered discounts to customers based on a machine that ranks their looks according to an algorithm. Customers with "beautiful" characteristics - such as symmetrical features - get better scores than those with noses that are "too big" or "too small" and those that get better scores will get cheaper meals. [Source]

State and commercial media tend to celebrate the advances of tech-related public-private partnerships. For instance, Xinhua lauds Sesame Credit's use of blacklists to incentivize citizens to repay their debt and improve their social credit scores. The state media giant cites figures showing that as of July 2017, Sesame Credit has assisted in penalization of 1.21 million debtors, with more than 126,000 of them having now repaid debts. While Chinese media highlights the punishment mechanisms to which information technology has given teeth by nature of its ubiquity and instantly administered effects, one unaddressed issue is the possibility that allowing fintech products to host social credit services may spur new sources of over-consumption and indebtedness.

Zheping Huang of Quartz has illustrated the consumption-driven data gathering business model underlying mobile payment app Alipay and its social credit scoring service Sesame Credit. Two years ago, Huang wrote an impressionistic piece about Sesame Credit when the service was still new and offered few benefits. Last week, Huang published an update at Quartz. He believes his Sesame Credit score rose 81 points in two years because he regularly uses Alipay to pay for meals and travel, and because he participates more often in augmented reality games and group tipping services that provide the company with more data on his behavior. Despite enjoying the advantages of a good score, Huang is cautious about how companies may share personal data with the state:

Two years ago, my middling Sesame Credit score entitled me to nothing more than a five-day VIP membership for a dating app. Today, I can among other things waive deposits when using some of China's most popular hotel-booking and bike-sharing services, thanks not only to my improved score, but also to more companies partnering with Alipay.

Alipay reminds me in the app that my score will be evaluated "more thoroughly" after I complete my personal information, including academic degrees, work email, and property-ownership certificates-things I don't feel comfortable handing over to Alibaba. Many, myself included, fear that the Chinese government will eventually snoop into the data collected by private companies for surveillance purposes, despite how purely commercial Sesame Credit looks at the moment. [Source]

Meanwhile, as The Wall Street Journal's Li Yuan wrote last week, companies are also apprehensive at the prospect of greater official intervention. One channel through which this may come is the government's purchase of small stakes in tech firms:

While the authoritarian government already exerts heavy sway over businesses through regulation, a management role would give Beijing a direct hand in innovative companies that service hundreds of millions of Chinese.

The biggest of these companies have expanded beyond their original niches into finance, health care and transportation, collecting data that give them unparalleled insights into people's lives. Some companies privately say they are wary of the move.

[...] Beijing began floating the idea of special management shares in the spring of 2016, circulating a draft proposal suggesting a 1% government stake in exchange for board representation. Some companies thought the plan would fizzle, in part because of the potential for shareholder lawsuits and the high cost of shares. A 1% stake in Hong Kong-listed Tencent, for example, would cost over $4 billion. Others privately worried that bringing the government onboard would jeopardize their relative independence and affect innovation.

"This is the thing that keeps Pony up at night," says a Tencent executive about Mr. Ma, the company's chief executive. [Source]

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How Tech Firms Partner with Beijing to Shame Citizens

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China's top tech companies have often expressed willingness to share users' personal data with the state as part of a tacit bargain that allows them to expand with minimal regulatory interference. Several revelations this year have made it increasingly clear how networks of surveillance, reward, and punishment are sustained by partnerships between tech firms (both big and small) and Chinese courts, telephone service providers, and state security.

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Leaked documents detail for the first time China's systematic brainwashing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in a network of high-security prison camps.

The Chinese government has consistently claimed the camps in the far western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training.

But official documents, seen by BBC Panorama, show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished.

China's UK ambassador dismissed the documents as fake news.

The leak was made to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has worked with 17 media partners, including BBC Panorama and The Guardian newspaper in the UK.

The investigation has found new evidence which undermines Beijing's claim that the detention camps, which have been built across Xinjiang in the past three years, are for voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism.

About a million people - mostly from the Muslim Uighur community - are thought to have been detained without trial.

The leaked Chinese government documents, which the ICIJ have labelled "The China Cables", include a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official, to those who run the camps.

The instructions make it clear that the camps should be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline, punishments and no escapes.

The memo includes orders to:

"Never allow escapes"

"Increase discipline and punishment of behavioural violations"

"Promote repentance and confession"

"Make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority"

"Encourage students to truly transform"

"[Ensure] full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots"

The documents reveal how every aspect of a detainee's life is monitored and controlled: "The students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed.

"Implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, roll call, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth."

Other documents confirm the extraordinary scale of the detentions. One reveals that 15,000 people from southern Xinjiang were sent to the camps over the course of just one week in 2017.

Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the leaked memo should be used by prosecutors.

"This is an actionable piece of evidence, documenting a gross human rights violation," she said. "I think it's fair to describe everyone being detained as being subject at least to psychological torture, because they literally don't know how long they're going to be there.

The memo details how detainees will only be released when they can demonstrate they have transformed their behaviour, beliefs and language.

"Promote the repentance and confession of the students for them to understand deeply the illegal, criminal and dangerous nature of their past activity," it says.

"For those who harbour vague understandings, negative attitudes or even feelings of resistance... carry out education transformation to ensure that results are achieved."

Ben Emmerson QC, a leading human rights lawyer and an adviser to the World Uighur Congress, said the camps were trying to change people's identity.

"It is very difficult to view that as anything other than a mass brainwashing scheme designed and directed at an entire ethnic community.

"It's a total transformation that is designed specifically to wipe the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group off the face of the Earth."

China's hidden camps

Detainees are awarded points for their "ideological transformation, study and training, and compliance with discipline", the memo says.

The punishment-and-reward system helps determine whether inmates are allowed contact with family and when they are released. They are only considered for release once four Communist Party committees have seen evidence they have been transformed.

The leaked documents also reveal how the Chinese government uses mass surveillance and a predictive-policing programme that analyses personal data.

One document shows how the system flagged 1.8m people simply because they had a data sharing app called Zapya on their phone.

The authorities then ordered the investigation of 40,557 of them "one by one". The document says "if it is not possible to eliminate suspicion" they should be sent for "concentrated training".

The documents include explicit directives to arrest Uighurs with foreign citizenship and to track Uighurs living abroad. They suggest that China's embassies and consulates are involved in the global dragnet.

Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming said the measures had safeguarded local people and there had not been a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang in the past three years.

"The region now enjoys social stability and unity among ethnic groups. People there are living a happy life with a much stronger sense of fulfilment and security.

"In total disregard of the facts, some people in the West have been fiercely slandering and smearing China over Xinjiang in an attempt to create an excuse to interfere in China's internal affairs, disrupt China's counter-terrorism efforts in Xinjiang and thwart China's steady development."

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Data leak details China's 'brainwashing system'

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Leaked documents detail for the first time China's systematic brainwashing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in a network of high-security prison camps. The Chinese government has consistently claimed the camps in the far western Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training. But official documents, seen by BBC Panorama, show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished.

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One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority (Published 2019)

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In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.

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China is waging an unprecedented, high-tech crackdown in the Xinjiang region, home to a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs.

Officials there use an intrusive app where they are prompted to log extremely personal information like political views, use of birth control, and use of electricity at home.

Human Rights Watch revealed how it works in a recent report. Scroll down to learn more.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Officials in Xinjiang, China's most oppressed region, use an intrusive, all-seeing smartphone app to monitor, track, and flag citizens for investigation or punishment.

A new report gives a glimpse into how it works, and allows the Chinese state a vast array of deeply personal information on its oppressed citizens, like their blood type, how much gas they use, and whether they are on birth control.

Xinjiang has in recent years come under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny because of the country's crackdown on the Uighurs, a majority-Muslim ethnic minority concentrated there. Uighurs often refers to the region as East Turkestan.

Officials in the region have installed hundreds of thousands of facial recognition cameras, forced Uighurs to download software that would crawl their phones, and held at least 1 million Muslims in prison-like detention centers.

Beijing justifies its crackdown by calling Uighurs a national-security threat, and has routinely tried to stoke Islamophobia to justify its controversial policies in the region.

Authorities are also required to use a mobile app to log citizens' personal data, track citizens' activity, and flag "dangerous" individuals for investigation or punishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report published last week.

The app is connected to the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) - a centralized data system that stores data about all of Xinjiang's residents. HRW researchers were able to crack into it by reverse-engineering its source code.

-Maya Wang 王松莲 (@wang_maya) May 2, 2019

Here's how the app works.

Hoovering up whereabouts, blood types, and birth control methods

The app asks Xinjiang authorities to grill citizens and log via their phones an array of information, including their height, blood type, and vehicle registration number, HRW reported.

It also asks officials to glean intrusive personal information from citizens, including political views, whether they communicate with relatives abroad, and even their use of birth control, the researchers said.

Many Uighurs have been disappeared and detained for bizarre reasons, including setting clocks to a different time zone than Beijing's, wearing veils, and communicating with people who have gone abroad.

Xinjiang authorities currently have the right to stop any Uighur citizens in the region, question them, search their phones, and detain them if necessary.
Read more: Relatives of China's oppressed Muslim minority are getting blocked online by their own family members, who are terrified to even tell them how bad their lives are

Most of the behavior that IJOP have nothing to do with counterterrorism, HRW noted.

The purpose of logging all this information is to flag any sort of digression from what the government sees as "normal" behavior to create "micro-clues" that a citizen is suspicious and warrants further investigation by officials.

The app classifies suspects based on 36 "person types" deemed suspicious, which range from being related to a convicted criminal, to seldom using their front door, to "using an abnormal amount of electricity."
Read more: Chinese authorities are reportedly using an app to monitor Muslims in Xinjiang and see if they match 36 'person types' deemed as dangerous
The videos below shows that officials are required to select from a drop-down list to note whether they gathered the information during home visits, stop-and-search on the streets, at re-education camps, or other methods.

The two clips below also show multiple demands for personal information, which could potentially lead to a person getting flagged as suspicious.

The central IJOP data center then sends alerts to officials about people marked as suspicious, and prompts them to visit them to gather more information, HRW said.

'Data doors' that suck up information without anyone knowing

The IJOP doesn't solely rely on government officials to populate the app with data collected manually.

China has also installed at various checkpoints around the city machines named "three-dimensional portrait and integrated data doors," which suck up information from people's electronic devices without them knowing.

These "data doors" detect, collect, and keep the MAC addresses and IMEI numbers of people's phones, HRW said.

A MAC (Media Access Control) address is the unique hardware identification number emitted by a device, and can be used to track people's physical movements.

The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) is a unique number that identifies a cellphone, and allows networks to locate it.

It's not clear how many "data doors" are scattered around Xinjiang, but there are likely thousands of checkpoints across the region - there can as many as four or five checkpoints per kilometer, The Economist reported.

These checkpoints, unlike IJOP, seem to mainly target Uighurs. Han Chinese - the dominant ethnic group in the country - and foreigners are often waived through them without being stopped or asked for ID, CNN reported. Uighur expert Darren Byler separately said the same thing in a report for Eurasianet.

IJOP also relies on a vast network of cameras, some of which have facial-recognition and night vision, HRW said.

A model for the rest of China - and the world?

Xinjiang has over the past two years become China's de facto surveillance laboratory. China has heavily invested in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology - which remains fairly limited and glitchy at this point - but nowhere in the country is surveillance as intrusive as in Xinjiang.

China has invested about $7.2 billion in security technology over the past two years alone, Byler wrote in The Guardian last month.
Read more: China's 'Big Brother' surveillance technology isn't nearly as all-seeing as the government wants you to think

That's not to say, however, that this level of surveillance won't materialize in the rest of China. The country is already rolling out an ambitious and controversial " social credit system" that can track, reward, and punish citizens' behavior around the country.

Maya Wang, the lead researcher of the HRW report, told Business Insider: "Although this particular variant of China's mass surveillance systems, the IJOP, is used only in Xinjiang, this story is not unique. The ideas and designs behind Xinjiang's mass surveillance systems are the same as those behind other mass surveillance systems in China."

Byler, the Uighur expert, also noted in The Guardian that Zimbabwe in 2018 signed a contract with Cloudwalk, a facial-recognition company used in Xinjiang's surveillance apparatus, to police its airports and stations through a biometric database not unlike IJOP.

Venezuela last year also rolled out a "fatherland card," manufactured by China's state-run ZTE Corp, that tracks, rewards, and punishes citizens depending on their actions.

'We can still mitigate the abuses'

Though Wang noted that China's human rights record in Xinjiang could spread to the rest of China, "we're still some ways before this full dystopia," she said.

"I think if foreign governments can act now with targeted sanctions, export controls, and generally improving standards for privacy everywhere (particularly reining in AI companies on their end), we can still mitigate the abuses going forward," she added.

Democratic and Republican senators in the US have for months pushed the White House to impose sanctions on human rights offenders in Xinjiang and limit the export of US tech to China, but say that the administration " has taken no meaningful action."

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China uses an intrusive surveillance app to track its Muslim minority, with technology that could be exported to the rest of the world. Here's how it works.

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China is waging an unprecedented, high-tech crackdown in the Xinjiang region, home to a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs. Officials there use an intrusive app where they are prompted to log extremely personal information like political views, use of birth control, and use of electricity at home.

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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

If you are a romantic, you are probably not on Tinder, the latest big addition to the online dating world. Tinder is the aptly named heterosexual version of Grindr, an older hook-up app that identifies available gay, bisexual, or "curious" partners in the vicinity.

It is also the modern blend of hot-or-not, in that users are required to judge pictures from fellow Tinderers by simply swiping right if they like them or left if they don't, and 1980s telephone bars, in that phone flirting precedes face-to-face interaction.

Thus Tinder is hardly original, yet it has taken the mobile dating market by storm: despite launching only last year, an estimated 450 million profiles are rated every day and membership is growing by 15% each week. More importantly, and in stark contrast with the overwhelmingly negative media reception, Tinder has managed to overcome the two big hurdles to online dating. First, Tinder is cool, at least to its users.

Indeed, whereas it is still somewhat embarrassing to confess to using EHarmony or Match.com, Tinderers are proud to demo the app at a dinner party, perhaps because the alternative - logging off and talking to others guests - is less appealing.

Second, through eliminating time lags and distance, Tinder bridges the gap between digital and physical dating, enabling users to experience instant gratification and making Tinder almost as addictive as Facebook (the average user is on it 11-minutes per day).

But the bigger lessons from the Tinder effect are psychological. Let me offer a few here:
* Hook-up apps are more arousing than actual hook-ups:
In our technosexual era, the process of dating has not only been gamified, but also sexualised, by technology. Mobile dating is much more than a means to an end, it is an end in itself. With Tinder, the pretext is to hook-up, but the real pleasure is derived from the Tindering process. Tinder is just the latest example for the sexualisation of urban gadgets: it is nomophobia, Facebook-porn and Candy Crush Saga all in one.

* Digital eligibility exceeds physical eligibility:

Although Tinder has gained trustworthiness vis-à-vis traditional dating sites by importing users' pictures and basic background info from Facebook, that hardly makes Tinder profiles realistic. What it does, however, is to increase average levels of attractiveness compared to the real world. Given that most people spend a great deal of time curating their Facebook profiles - uploading selfies from Instagram and reporting well calculated and sophisticated food, music, and film interest - one is left wondering how on earth Tinder users are single in the first place ... but only until you meet them.

* Evolutionary and social needs:

Like any successful internet service, Tinder enables people to fulfil some basic evolutionary and social needs. This is an important point: we tend to overestimate the impact of technology on human behaviour; more often than not, it is human behaviour that drives technological changes and explains their success or failures. Just like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, Tinder enables people to get along, albeit in a somewhat infantile, sexual and superficial way. It also enables us to get ahead, nourishing our competitive instincts by testing and maximising our dating potential. And lastly, Tinder enables users to satisfy their intellectual curiosity: finding out not only about other people's interests and personality, but what they think of ours'.
* Tinder does emulate the real dating world:
As much as critics (who are beginning to resemble puritans or conservatives) don't want to hear it, Tinder is an extension of mainstream real-world dating habits, especially compared to traditional online dating sites. This has been an important lesson for data enthusiasts who have tried to sterilise the game of love by injecting rigorous decision-making and psychometric algorithms into the process. Well, it turns out that people are a lot more superficial than psychologists thought. They would rather judge 50 pictures in two minutes than spend 50 minutes assessing one potential partner.

This reminds me of a TV show we created a couple of years ago; we profiled over 3,000 singletons using state-of-the-art psychological tests and created 500 couples based on psychological compatibility... but ignored looks and race. When the couples finally met - even though they trusted the science of the matching process - they were 90% focused on looks and only decided to date a second time if they were deemed equally attractive or worthy of each other's looks.

So, just like the social dynamics at a bar, Tindering comprises a series of simple and intuitive steps: you first assess the picture, then you gauge interest and only then you decide to start a (rudimentary) conversation. Clearly, psychologists have a lot of work to do before they can convince daters that their algorithms are more effective.

* Romanticism is dead, except in retail: This is not a cynical statement. Let's face it, if it weren't for Valentine's Day and the engagement industry, we would have officially moved beyond romanticism by now. The realities of the dating world could not be more different. People are time-deprived, careers have priority over relationships, not least because they are often a prerequisite to them, and the idea of a unique perfect match or soul-mate is a statistical impossibility.

Yes, some people still embrace a certain degree of serendipity, but the abundance of tools - admittedly, most still under construction - to reduce the huge gap between demand and supply is bound to make the dating market more efficient and rational, even if it doesn't translate into long-term relationship success.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of business psychology at University College London and vice-president of research and innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com and author of Get more articles like this sent direct to your inbox by signing up for free membership to the Guardian Media Network - brought to you by Guardian Professional. Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt Topics

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The Tinder effect: psychology of dating in the technosexual era

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Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic If you are a romantic, you are probably not on Tinder, the latest big addition to the online dating world. Tinder is the aptly named heterosexual version of Grindr, an older hook-up app that identifies available gay, bisexual, or "curious" partners in the vicinity.

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Google and Amazon are now in the oil industry.

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Google and Amazon are now in the oil industry.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been very vocal about their efforts to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels. But as the Wall Street Journal and Gizmodo have reported, these same companies are currently teaming up with the fossil fuel industry to help them squeeze as much oil and gas out of the ground as possible.

Oil has always been hard to find and hard to extract, and so the industry has teetered precariously on the edge of profitability several times throughout its history. Over and over again, experts have predicted that we'll soon run out of accessible, affordable oil - but so far, they've been wrong. Just when things look bleakest for black gold, new technology swoops in to keep the industry afloat.

In the early days, that technology came in the form of better drills and pumps. As we explain in the video above, today's technological savior is artificial intelligence. Computer algorithms that perpetually improve themselves can automate the discovery of new reserves and streamline fossil fuel extraction - a big boost for companies that now have to compete with wind and solar.

In 2018, the oil and gas industries spent an estimated $1.75 billion on AI - a sum that is projected to balloon to $4 billion by 2025. To get their piece of that pie, big tech companies are developing AI for oil companies, even as they publicly celebrate their sustainable initiatives.

We reached out to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Total for comment on this piece. None of them responded.

You can find this video and all of Vox's videos on YouTube. And join the Open Sourced Reporting Network to help us report on the real consequences of data, privacy, algorithms, and AI.
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

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Google and Amazon are now in the oil business

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Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing - and changing us. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been very vocal about their efforts to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

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Airbnb has developed technology that looks at guests' online "personalities" when they book a break to calculate the risk of them trashing a host's home.

Details have emerged of its "trait analyser" software built to scour the web to assess users' "trustworthiness and compatibility" as well as their "behavioural and personality traits" in a bid to forecast suitability to rent a property.

It comes after complaints from London hosts that guests thought to be suitable have held rowdy parties at properties. They include a woman who said her £2.5 million flat was wrecked by hundreds of drug-fuelled ravers after renting it out for a "baby shower".

The background check technology was revealed in a patent published by the European Patent Office after being granted in the US last year.

Airbnb pledges major safety changes following house party deaths

According to the patent, Airbnb could deploy its software to scan sites including social media for traits such as "conscientiousness and openness" against the usual credit and identity checks and what it describes as "secure third-party databases". Traits such as "neuroticism and involvement in crimes" and "narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy" are "perceived as untrustworthy".

It uses artificial intelligence to mark down those found to be "associated" with fake social network profiles, or those who have given any false details. The patent also suggests users are scored poorly if keywords, images or video associated with them are involved with drugs or alcohol, hate websites or organisations, or sex work.

It adds that people "involved in pornography" or who have "authored online content with negative language" will be marked down.

The machine learning also scans news stories that could be about the person, such as an article related to a crime, and can "weight" the seriousness of offences. Postings to blogs and news websites are also taken into account to form a "person graph", the patent says.

This combined data analyses how the customer acts towards others offline, along with cross-referencing metrics including "social connections", employment and education history.

The machine learning then calculates the "compatibility" of host and guest.

The top travel trends for 2020, according to experts

Airbnb said the patent was a continuation of its work after acquiring background check start-up Trooly, but declined to comment on its uses.

On its website it states: "Every Airbnb reservation is scored for risk before it's confirmed. We use predictive analytics and machine learning to instantly evaluate hundreds of signals that help us flag and investigate suspicious activity before it happens."

London tech entrepreneur Jess Butcher, co-founder of Tick and Blippar, said the technology raised concerns over the extent to which "personal digital footprints" are being used.

Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, said: "We are rushing into a reliance upon machine learning in making decisions that normally humans would exercise judgment on."
Women in tech podcast returns Listen and subscribe to Women Tech Charge on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts

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New Airbnb tech could scan your online life before you book a stay

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Airbnb has developed technology that looks at guests' online "personalities" when they book a break to calculate the risk of them trashing a host's home. Details have emerged of its "trait analyser" software built to scour the web to assess users' "trustworthiness and compatibility" as well as their "behavioural and personality traits" in a bid to forecast suitability to rent a property.

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Racial diversity problems in the video game industry 

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Racial diversity problems in the video game industry 

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As summer dwindled to a close and students returned to school, many gamers were eagerly awaiting October 7, when would hit U.S. shelves. Six years in the making, it was one of the most highly anticipated video games of 2016. The game takes place in 1968, in the crime-ridden city of New Bordeaux-a fictional version of New Orleans, complete with bayous, muscle cars and French Quarter-style balconies. Reviewers have praised Mafia 3 's intelligent storytelling, elaborately detailed scenes and a refreshing open-world gameplay that allows players to shape their environment. But others were looking forward to the game's arrival for a different reason: Its protagonist, Lincoln Clay, is African-American.

Black leading characters like Clay are rare in the gaming world. And when they do show up, they often appear as sidekicks, overly muscular antagonists or comic relief. Or they're narrowly typecast as athletes, rappers and gangsters. "Like she's from this broken home. Or he's a rapper guy. Or he's poor, and his mom is on drugs, and his daddy's gone," says Derek Manns, a game designer at DeVry University in Illinois.

Some steps have been taken to include more leading black characters in video games. Earlier examples include Lee Everett from The Walking Dead and Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. While it's true that white characters often have shady or violent pasts, the stereotypes for black characters persist. The Walking Dead opens with a handcuffed Everett sitting in the back of a police car, Vance's character is a non-playable sidekick, and Clay is a criminal who starts his own syndicate.

Some argue that racial diversity is more important in video games than in TV or film. Gamers can develop a visceral relationship with characters in a way that is more compelling than in other media. "[Video games are] more tactile and so much more interactive," says Marcus Montgomery, lead game designer at Limbic and a 20-year industry veteran.

That, according to Montgomery and others, is why it's important that the industry broaden its representations of African-Americans, especially for the young black kids who grow up playing such games. Black kids "don't see African-American engineers, doctors or software engineers" in video games, says Thomas Mensah, one of the inventors of fiber optics. Mensah, who is from Ghana, is leading an effort called STEM Reach 2020, which is aimed at attracting more school-age minorities to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Of course, white kids are not seeing white engineers or doctors in video games either.

To tackle this diversity problem, some experts have suggested taking a look at who's creating these games-or more important, who isn't. The International Game Developers Association suggests that only 3 percent of game developers are African-American, a figure that has risen by only 0.5 percent in the past decade. In comparison, 76 percent of developers are white. "The industry has an even bigger problem with race than it does with gender," says Avonelle Wing, a gaming convention organizer with the company Double Exposure . "The people who speak out against race will likely be a single voice against a torrent of apathy. It's something people have a hard time looking straight at."

Black game developers attribute their small number to a few factors: financial barriers, insufficient training and a lack of opportunity. The game design industry, like many others, tends to be insular. Jobs come from whom you know and what connections you have, says Manns. "It's usually just, 'Hey, I have a friend who can do this, and he's a good guy.'"

But having more diverse teams can lead to better products, Manns says. And Montgomery agrees: "If you have more diverse storytellers, they will start to bring their own perspectives and try and attack different avenues that have not been explored before."

This isn't to say good games can't be made without minority developers. Games are often created by people without inside knowledge of a culture different from their own. This normally entails doing lots of careful research. The action-adventure game Assassin's Creed III: Liberation is often cited as a good example of this-where a team of non-black writers were praised for their creation of the half-French, half-Haitian protagonist Aveline living in 18th-century New Orleans.

"There's always going to be a critical nuance that's more explored if you are from a particular demographic," says Montgomery. "Like, I'm a heterosexual male, I have no idea what it's like to be a lesbian woman. I don't think any kind of research is going to allow me to get the right nuance."

It's that insider's perspective that drew We Are Chicago praise for its realistic portrayal of what it's like to navigate the crime- and drug-ridden streets in that city's South Side. The game, released earlier this year, is a first-person narrative adventure played through the eyes of Aaron, a young African-American man growing up in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood. Writer Tony Thornton helped create Aaron's world by drawing on his experiences living in Englewood, as well as conducting multiple interviews with its residents.

The 2014 game Never Alone is another example of the richness that can result when members of a group you're trying to depict are included in the game-making process. Never Alone, praised for its "excellent job of giving a cultural context," was developed in collaboration with 40 Alaska Native elders and members from the Iñupiat community.

An increase in the number of black game developers will better reflect the people who are playing the games. A 2015 survey by Pew Research Center found that 53 percent of black adults play video games, 11 percent of whom are self-described "gamers." For white adults, these figures were 48 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

A handful of organizations have cropped up in recent years to attract more black developers to game design. Montgomery is part of Blacks in Gaming, which is aimed at helping African-Americans produce video games. Mensah is the chairman of Entertainment Arts Research Inc. , the first African-American-owned video game development company in the U.S.

That's a remarkable disparity between black players and those who design the games they play. While the cliché that African-American males enjoy sports games like (basketball) and (soccer) may be true, says Manns, "there are a lot of black nerds out there who like playing sci-fi and fantasy games as well." And that's a clue to what might be needed to boost African-Americans' presence in video games. Game design needs more of those black gamers.

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The video game industry's problem with racial diversity

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As summer dwindled to a close and students returned to school, many gamers were eagerly awaiting October 7, when would hit U.S. shelves. Six years in the making, it was one of the most highly anticipated video games of 2016.

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Is youtube recommends algorithm radicalising people

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Is youtube recommends algorithm radicalising people

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Does YouTube create extremists? A recent study caused arguments among scientists by arguing that the algorithms that power the site don't help radicalise people by recommending ever more extreme videos, as has been suggested in recent years.

The paper, submitted to open-access journal First Monday but yet to be formally peer-reviewed, analysed video recommendations received by different types of channels. It claimed that YouTube's algorithm favours mainstream media channels over independent content, concluding that radicalisation has more to do with the people who create harmful content than the site's algorithm.

Specialists in the field were quick in responding to the study, with some criticising the paper's methods and others arguing the algorithm was one of several important factors and that data science alone won't give us the answer.

The problem with this discussion is that we can't really answer the question of what role YouTube's algorithm plays in radicalising people because we don't understand how it works. And this is just a symptom of a much broader problem. These algorithms play an increasing role in our daily lives but lack any kind of transparency.

It's hard to argue that YouTube doesn't play a role in radicalisation. This was first pointed out by technology sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who illustrated how recommended videos gradually drive users towards more extreme content. In Tufekci's words, videos about jogging lead to videos about running ultramarathons, videos about vaccines lead to conspiracy theories, and videos about politics lead to "Holocaust denials and other disturbing content".

This has also been written about in detail by ex-YouTube employee Guillaume Chaslot who worked on the site's recommendation algorithm. Since leaving the company, Chaslot has continued trying to make those recommendations more transparent. He says YouTube recommendations are biased towards conspiracy theories and factually inaccurate videos, which nevertheless get people to spend more time on the site.

In fact, maximising watchtime is the whole point of YouTube's algorithms, and this encourages video creators to fight for attention in any way possible. The company's sheer lack of transparency about exactly how this works makes it nearly impossible to fight radicalisation on the site. After all, without transparency, it is hard to know what can be changed to improve the situation.

Who is Danny/Shutterstock

But YouTube isn't unusual in this respect. A lack of transparency about how algorithms work is usually the case whenever they are used in large systems, whether by private companies or public bodies. As well as deciding what video to show you next, machine learning algorithms are now used to place children in schools, decide on prison sentences, determine credit scores and insurance rates, as well as the fate of immigrants, job candidates and university applicants. And usually we don't understand how these systems make their decisions.

Researchers have found creative ways of showing the impact of these algorithms on society, whether by examining the rise of the reactionary right or the spread of conspiracy theories on YouTube, or by showing how search engines reflect the racist biases of the people who create them.

Machine-learning systems are usually big, complex, and opaque. Fittingly, they are often described as black boxes, where information goes in, and information or actions come out, but no one can see what happens in between. This means that, as we do not know exactly how algorithms like the YouTube recommendation system operate, trying to work out how the site works would be like trying to understand a car without opening the bonnet.

In turn, this means that trying to write laws to regulate what algorithms should or shouldn't do becomes a blind process or trial and error. This is what is happening with YouTube and with so many other machine learning algorithms. We are trying to have a say in their outcomes, without a real understanding of how they really work. We need to open up these patented technologies, or at least make them transparent enough that we can regulate them.

Explanations and testing

One way to do this would be for algorithms to provide counterfactual explanations along with their decisions. This means working out the minimum conditions needed for the algorithm to make a different decision, without describing its full logic. For instance, an algorithm making decisions about bank loans might produce an output that says that "if you were over 18 and had no prior debt, you would have your bank loan accepted". But this might be difficult to do with YouTube and other sites that use recommendation algorithms, as in theory any video on the platform could be recommended at any point.

Another powerful tool is algorithm testing and auditing, which has been particularly useful in diagnosing biased algorithms. In a recent case, a professional resume-screening company discovered that its algorithm was prioritising two factors as best predictors of job performance: whether the candidate's name was Jared, and if they played lacrosse in high school. This is what happens when the machine goes unsupervised.

In this case, the resume-screening algorithm had noticed white men had a higher chance of being hired, and had found correlating proxy characteristics (such as being named Jared or playing lacrosse) present in the candidates being hired. With YouTube, algorithm auditing could help understand what kinds of videos are prioritised for recommendation - and perhaps help settle the debate about whether YouTube recommendations contribute to radicalisation or not.

Introducing counterfactual explanations or using algorithm auditing is a difficult, costly process. But it's important, because the alternative is worse. If algorithms go unchecked and unregulated, we could see a gradual creep of conspiracy theorists and extremists into our media, and our attention controlled by whoever can produce the most profitable content.

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YouTube's algorithms might radicalise people - but the real problem is we've no idea how they work

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Does YouTube create extremists? A recent study caused arguments among scientists by arguing that the algorithms that power the site don't help radicalise people by recommending ever more extreme videos, as has been suggested in recent years. The paper, submitted to open-access journal First Monday but yet to be formally peer-reviewed, analysed video recommendations received by different types of channels.

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Apple pressured into unlocking Iphones of Saudi Gunmen

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Apple pressured into unlocking Iphones of Saudi Gunmen

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The US attorney-general has called on Apple to help unlock two iPhones owned by a Saudi air force officer who killed three Americans in a shooting on a US naval base in what he called an " act of terrorism ".

William Barr said Apple had not given the government "any substantive assistance" as federal investigators sought access to the devices to determine who Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani was talking to before the attack.

"We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of Americans and prevent future attacks," he said at a press conference in Washington.

The public appeal was the latest volley in a long-running battle between Apple and the federal government over the strong encryption the phonemaker uses in its products.

In 2016, the justice department sued Apple to force it to help unlock an iPhone belonging to a terrorist attacker in the southern California city of San Bernardino. That case was eventually dropped after the government found a third-party vendor who could break into the device.

In a statement on Monday evening, Apple rejected Mr Barr's characterisation and said its responses had been "timely, thorough and are ongoing" adding that it will "work tirelessly to help them investigate this tragic attack on our nation".

However, Apple stood firmly by its controversial 2016 decision not to help law enforcement hack into an iPhone. "We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys," the company said. "Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers.

"Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations. We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data."

Mr Barr said the investigation into the December 6 shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida had so far found no evidence of "assistance or pre-knowledge" of the attack by any other Saudi military members training in the US.

Alshamrani had attempted to destroy the two iPhones, Mr Barr said, including by firing a bullet into one of them.

FBI specialists had successfully repaired the devices to make them operational again but had been unable to access their contents despite court authorisation. Last week the FBI's general counsel, Dana Boente, wrote to Apple requesting assistance.

Mr Barr on Monday declined to say if the government was considering taking legal action against Apple again but suggested that the FBI had already exhausted all possible avenues in attempting to get into the phones. In 2018, Apple introduced a software update to close off the method used in the San Bernardino case.

A senior justice department official clarified that the FBI had been "working to exhaust all of its readily available options", including with foreign governments and private sector companies, in the month since the shooting.

After the San Bernardino dispute, a report by the justice department's inspector-general had suggested the bureau failed to "pursue all possible avenues" to unlock the phone.

Recommended

David Bowdich, the deputy director of the FBI, said agents had not identified any co-conspirators or evidence that Alshamrani, who was killed in the attack, was "inspired by any one specific group".

In the course of the probe, investigators discovered "derogatory material" possessed by 21 other members of the Saudi military training in the US, including "jihadi or anti-American content" and, for 15 of the members, contact with child sex abuse imagery.

All 21 were returning to Saudi Arabia later on Monday, said Mr Barr. "The kingdom has assured me that it will review each of these cases under their code of military justice and criminal code," he added.
This article has been amended since earlier versions to note in the first sentence that the US military facility is a naval base

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US presses Apple to unlock iPhones of Saudi gunman

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The US attorney-general has called on Apple to help unlock two iPhones owned by a Saudi air force officer who killed three Americans in a shooting on a US naval base in what he called an " act of terrorism ".

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Bezos' phone hack should terrify everyone 

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Bezos' phone hack should terrify everyone 

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Those with the most to lose don't always safeguard their privacy very well. You can do better.

Credit... Nicholas Konrad

If the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, wants to chat on WhatsApp, politely decline.

That's the lesson from a series of reports this week based off a forensic examination of Jeff Bezos' communications with the crown prince. The investigation - conducted at Mr. Bezos' request by FTI Consulting - found that his phone had most likely been attacked in 2018 after he received a WhatsApp message from the prince's personal account. While my colleagues in the Times newsroom have pieced together details of the investigation, there's still a great deal unknown. And cybersecurity experts have serious questions about FTI's report, which, according to CyberScoop, " has not impressed the information security community. "

Still, the story seems to have everything: from lighthearted, embarrassingly earnest texts, "divorced guy" memes and world leaders who awkwardly sign their text messages with their full names to the deeply problematic issue of revenge porn and stealing of private nude photos. Though it's a gilded example of digital theft, there's something troubling and relatable about it all. Billionaires, they're just like us!

Or maybe not. Looked at one way, the attack on Mr. Bezos' phone could be seen as yet more proof of what my colleague Kara Swisher called " the death of privacy." If the richest man in the world - the man who sells listening devices used in millions of homes and whose servers create the internet's infrastructure - can be hacked, what hope is there for us mere mortals?

Turns out, there's some. Yes, your personal privacy and security are constantly under threat. And yes, you should be trying to safeguard against malware, phishing and bulk data collection. But the Bezos attack is an example of extremely targeted surveillance, the potentially expensive and risky kind that is aimed at high-value targets like executives, government officials, celebrities and billionaires. And as it turns out, many of those with the most to lose are woefully inept at safeguarding their privacy.

Not long after the Bezos news broke this week, I spoke to Christopher Pierson, who founded BlackCloak, a cybersecurity company for high-net-worth and high-profile individuals - executives, celebrities and billionaires. According to Mr. Pierson, few people take their digital lives as seriously as they should.

"The majority of clients we onboard come on in some kind of hacked state," he told me. "Their computers are compromised or their login credentials are available on dark web. Their home camera systems are accessible to people on internet or their entire home and appliances are vulnerable and viewable by persons remotely." Mr. Pierson suggests that's in part because high-value targets choose to focus on physical security over digital and invest in private bodyguards, camera systems and protections like kidnapping insurance.

How bad is it? "We see passwords in little black books on desks by the machines and in files on the computers. We see passwords that are the same everywhere. We absolutely do not see good use of dual factor authentication on email, health care and financial accounts. I'd say we see less than 1 percent of high-net-worth individuals using dual factor."

Mr. Pierson said BlackCloak has found more than 82 percent of its clients' current passwords on the dark web when it ran an initial search. "In the case of high-net-worth individuals, the same compromised password is frequently used by 20 to 40 different accounts - some of those are personal, some are in the office."

What Mr. Pierson describes is low-hanging fruit - the kind of security flaws that can quickly be fixed with a little knowledge and attention to detail. Even then, he said, it takes time for the true nature of clients' vulnerability to sink in. "They're shocked when we give them their password and tell them where we found it, but it doesn't hit as hard as when we tell them their entire home automation system has been potentially online and viewable for three or five or eight years," he said.

When it comes to a Bezos-style breach - potentially at the hands of a nation-state's intelligence service - high-profile targets would most likely be even less prepared. As Mr. Bezos' lengthy investigation into the 2018 attack shows, it's difficult to get straight answers even when you have the money and resources to run full forensics.

Of course, it's not just wealth that turns somebody into a person of interest for hackers. Journalists, government employees, workers at energy companies and utilities could all be targets for someone. Those who work for financial companies, airlines, hospitals, universities, Hollywood studios and tech businesses are all potentially at risk. You can take steps to secure yourself from corporate data collection by using privacy settings on your phone. And to protect yourself from cyberattacks there are helpful guides you can use that have been vetted by security professionals.

For most of us, the attack against Mr. Bezos isn't the death of privacy, but a reminder of the risks of living a connected life. It should be a moment to think as critically about what you do online as you might in the real world. Invest in a password manager. Turn on dual factor authentication. Be skeptical of any communication that looks out of place.

For the ultrarich and influential, the Bezos hack should be a terrifying revelation. As the former State Department employee and whistle-blower John Napier Tye told me last autumn, "For someone who's truly a high-value target, there is no way to safely use a digital device." The stakes are astronomically high. Not just personally, as Mr. Bezos found, but professionally. Company secrets, matters of national security, access to critical infrastructure and the safety of employees could all be compromised by lax security at the top.

The internet has long been thought of as a truly democratic tool, flattening and democratizing the ability to publish and communicate. It's also the great privacy equalizer. Money can buy a lot of things. But on a dangerous internet full of exploits, flawed code, shady actors and absent-minded humans, total, foolproof security is not one of them.

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Opinion | Jeff Bezos' Phone Hack Should Terrify Everyone

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Those with the most to lose don't always safeguard their privacy very well. You can do better. If the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, wants to chat on WhatsApp, politely decline. That's the lesson from a series of reports this week based off a forensic examination of Jeff Bezos' communications with the crown prince.

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By the end of the 2020's virtual reality and realise will become merged.

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By the end of the 2020's virtual reality and realise will become merged.

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The 2010s will be remembered as the decade that screens invaded every part of our lives. In the next 10 years, we will see every part of our lives recreated inside the screen.

Virtual - and augmented - reality, powered by ever-more sophisticated smartphone cameras and ultra-realistic computer graphics, means that we will soon be able to step into a digital world that replicates ourselves and our offline environment in remarkable detail.

Those already fretting about smartphone addiction will find that prospect unnerving. But millions of us have already started on this journey. Anyone who has designed their own cartoon avatar in Snapchat's Bitmoji or Apple's Memoji has set foot in a new virtual reality.

Digital puppets were once the preserve of Hollywood. When the Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in the early 2000s, a sizeable chunk of its $281m budget went towards turning actor Andy Serkis into Gollum - a breakthrough moment for motion-capture technology. Now, every smartphone's selfie camera can become a motion-capture rig, mapping the subtlest changes in our facial expressions on to our digital doppelgängers.

In the two decades since LOTR, New Zealand-based Weta, the visual-effects studio behind Gollum, has progressed from monsters to creating disarmingly realistic digital people, such as Will Smith's younger clone in Gemini Man. Using the same technology, filmmakers are reanimating James Dean, who died 60 years ago. A CGI version of Dean has been cast in a new movie, Finding Jack, due out later this year.

Despite the backing of Dean's estate, Hollywood stars such as Chris Evans and Elijah Wood have baulked at bringing actors back from the dead. But this Black Mirror plotline is quickly coming to life. "Some people find a lot of this creepy. When I started investing in this space, people thought I was insane," Cyan Banister, a venture capitalist at Founders Fund, told the Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco last year. "But I think this is the future we are going to live in - and it's not so far off."

It is not just ourselves but our surroundings that are being digitally cloned. Apps such as Ubiquity6's Display.land allow real-world objects to be scanned into the virtual world in photorealistic 3D, simply by walking around them with a smartphone camera. Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, has invested in a series of technologies that will make it easy for other developers to incorporate lifelike people and places into their apps and games. At the same Virtual Beings Summit, Epic's chief technology officer Kim Libreri predicted: "In the next 10 years, the virtual world and the real world will merge into one. You won't really be able to tell the difference."

VR headsets have won few fans so far but by the end of the decade, new wearable devices, including smart glasses, may make immersive technologies more widely accessible. In the meantime, headsets such as Oculus Quest give us a peek into the "mirrorworld".

The latest Quest app from VR developer Tender Claws is called The Under Presents. Part multiplayer video game, part immersive theatre, it is inspired by productions where actors and audience mingle together, such as Punchdrunk's Sleep No More or a Secret Cinema performance.

For a limited time period, instead of the wooden "AIs" that typically inhabit video games, several of the characters lurking around The Under, an otherworldly cabaret bar, are being played by real actors. Improv artists, puppeteers and dancers were recruited by the developer.

The concept has never been tried before - in part because setting up and running a motion-capture studio for each character for months on end would be too expensive. In The Under Presents, each actor uses an Oculus Quest just like the players. Its motion-sensing headset and controllers capture mannerisms and gestures to bring its mysterious masked characters to life. "With just hands and heads tracked, you can be pretty expressive," says Danny Cannizzaro, co-founder of Tender Claws.

If the experts are right, over the next few years "virtual reality" will come to mean more than just a pair of unwieldy goggles. Instead of asking whether we are using our screens too much, in another decade the big question might be - which version of reality do we prefer?
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's global tech correspondent Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen and subscribe to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the FT, at ft.com/culture-call or on Apple Podcasts

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Enter the mirrorworld: how virtual reality will shape the 2020s

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The 2010s will be remembered as the decade that screens invaded every part of our lives. In the next 10 years, we will see every part of our lives recreated inside the screen.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Asia's Internet shut down are a violation of human rights 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Asia's Internet shut down are a violation of human rights 

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Last month, Myanmar announced it was - again - shutting down mobile data services in one of the country's most conflict-affected regions. Across the border in Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have lived without internet access in sprawling and overcrowded camps for months. In India's Kashmir, the world record for a state internet shutdown in a democracy was broken in December.

Taken together, all these point to a stark trend across the Asia-Pacific region, where governments are increasingly relying on internet shutdowns to control free speech.

Such blackouts are not just a violation of international law but can also have devastating consequences for those affected - from humanitarian aid workers to students trying to sit for exams. Internet shutdowns have skyrocketed in recent years. The campaign group Access Now recorded 188 shutdowns in 2018 compared with only 108 in 2017, and 128 in just the first six months of 2019. Last year, more than half of these blackouts took place in Asia.

In Myanmar's Rakhine State, where fighting between the military and the Arakan Army has intensified over the past year, authorities have blocked mobile data services off and on since last July. In February, a ban was reimposed in five of the most conflict-affected parts of the state, prompting outcry from activists, who have accused the military of trying to cover up its own rights abuses.

This is a part of the country where access for independent observers has been blocked for years. Human rights groups are almost fully reliant on internet correspondence with residents to find out what the real situation is on the ground. In fact, much of what we know of the vicious state-sponsored violence against the Rohingya minority in 2017 comes from evidence collected on mobile phones by victims and other people in the region themselves.

On the other side of the Naf - the river separating Bangladesh and Myanmar - almost a million Rohingya refugees have been without mobile data services since September 2019. The Bangladeshi government says the blackout is in response to growing insecurity in the camps, but already isolated refugees say they have been cut off even further from the outside world. Humanitarian actors have also raised serious concerns about the restrictions, since many rely on WhatsApp or other online technologies to co-ordinate relief efforts.

The undisputed "champion" of internet blackouts globally, however, is India. Of the 128 shutdowns during the first half of 2019, 80 took place in India alone. The most high-profile example is Kashmir, where internet services have been cut off since the majority Muslim territory was stripped of its autonomy in August 2019, although restrictions have somewhat eased recently.

Rights groups have warned that the shutdown has been used to cover a range of abuses, including arbitrary arrests and assaults of journalists. It has also had more mundane effects: many young Kashmiris have been unable to enrol in universities, for example, because the system is entirely online.

Indian authorities have made use of scores of smaller-scale shutdowns as well, including in the northern states of Assam and Meghalaya to quell protests against a controversial new citizenship law imposed last year. While civil society groups have cried foul, New Delhi has found an unlikely ally in Beijing. In December, state media in China - where all internet is heavily censored - praised the Indian government, arguing that "shutting down the internet in a state of emergency should be standard practice for sovereign countries".

Internet shutdowns are almost always a blatant violation of international human rights law. Governments only have a right to impose limitations on the right to freedom of expression in extremely limited circumstances. In many Asian countries, authorities have relied on vague arguments about "national security" that fall far below this threshold.

The restrictions can also have devastating consequences on people's lives, including preventing them from going to work or accessing basic services. There is even a growing debate on whether internet access in itself is a human right, and something governments should be obliged to provide citizens in the same way that they provide water or electricity.

While the sharp rise in internet blackouts in Asia is alarming, there are glimmers of hope. Across the region, civil society groups are fighting back against government's attempts to control the online sphere. In Pakistan, where authorities for years have restricted internet access in Balochistan and the border provinces with Afghanistan, activists have taken the fight for internet freedom to the courts. In 2018, in response to a petition by human rights groups, the Islamabad High Court declared that shutting down mobile networks for "security" reasons was illegal.

In the Indian state of Kerala, civil society campaigning played a large part in prompting the state government to become the first in the country to declare the internet a human right.

States must realise that while there are extremely limited circumstances where an internet shutdown could be justified, more often than not it does more harm than good. Cutting off the internet is not only a violation of human rights, it prevents communications and aid efforts, and harmfully interferes in people's lives - there is even research point to violence increasing during blackouts.

Instead of looking for new ways to control and restrict what is said online, governments across Asia should take a cue from civil society and look to champion free speech. The "Asian century" should be built on openness and debate - not repression and control.
Binaifer Nowrojee is Asia Pacific regional director for the Open Society Foundations beyondbrics is a forum on emerging markets for contributors from the worlds of business, finance, politics, academia and the third sector. All views expressed are those of the author(s) and should not be taken as reflecting the views of the Financial Times.

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Asia's internet shutdowns are a violation of human rights

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Last month, Myanmar announced it was - again - shutting down mobile data services in one of the country's most conflict-affected regions. Across the border in Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have lived without internet access in sprawling and overcrowded camps for months.

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London's police force is deploying facial recognition 

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London's police force is deploying facial recognition 

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London Police Are Taking Surveillance to a Whole New Level (Published 2020)

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The city, stepping into a debate over privacy, says it will use real-time facial recognition technology “to tackle serious crime.”

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Some of the UK's most popular health websites are sharing people's sensitive data - including medical symptoms, diagnoses, drug names and menstrual and fertility information - with dozens of companies around the world, ranging from ad-targeting giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Oracle, to lesser-known data-brokers and adtech firms like Scorecard and OpenX.

Using open-source tools to analyse 100 health websites, which include WebMD, Healthline, Babycentre and Bupa, an FT investigation found that 79 per cent of the sites dropped "cookies" - little bits of code that, when embedded in your browser, allow third-party companies to track individuals around the internet. This was done without the consent that is a legal requirement in the UK.

Google's advertising arm DoubleClick was by far the most common destination for data, showing up on 78 per cent of the sites tested, followed by Amazon, which was present in 48 per cent of cases, Facebook, Microsoft and adtech firm AppNexus.

"These findings are quite remarkable, and very concerning," said Wolfie Christl, a technologist and researcher who has been investigating the adtech industry. "From my perspective, this kind of data is clearly sensitive, has special protections under the [ General Data Protection Regulation] and transmitting this data most likely violates the law."

Health for sale

For centuries, physicians have sworn the Hippocratic oath, to keep secret "whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients".

But hundreds of millions of people now turn to the web each day to allay their medical worries, which range from the mundane to the grave. Despite the illusion of privacy that exists between users and their computers, the reality is starkly different.

Digging deeper into 10 of the sites, chosen to reflect the different types of health information they offer to users, the FT looked at the types of data they were sharing.

The investigation excluded data sent to analytics companies to improve the performance of a website, and consent was given for cookies on all the websites that requested it. The privacy policies the FT reporters consented to did not adequately outline that this sensitive data would be shared with third parties, however, or for what purposes.

The data shared included:

drug names entered into Drugs.com were sent to Google's ad unit DoubleClick.

symptoms inputted into WebMD's symptom checker, and diagnoses received, including "drug overdose", were shared with Facebook.

menstrual and ovulation cycle information from BabyCentre ended up with Amazon Marketing, among others.

keywords such as "heart disease" and "considering abortion" were shared from sites like the British Heart Foundation, Bupa and Healthline to companies including Scorecard Research and Blue Kai (owned by software giant Oracle).

In eight cases (with the exception of Healthline and Mind), a specific identifier linked to the web browser was also transmitted - potentially allowing the information to be tied to an individual - and tracker cookies were dropped before consent was given. Healthline confirmed that it also shared unique identifiers with third parties.

'Data silos of undesirables'

Since the adoption of the Europe-wide General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018, the EU online advertising industry, which makes $55bn of annual sales, has been subject to tighter rules around the collection and processing of data.

It is now illegal for advertisers to share the most sensitive data, including on health and sexual orientation, without explicit consent, where the user agrees to the specific sharing of their "special category" data, and is told how it will be used and by whom.

None of the websites tested asked for this type of explicit and detailed consent.

The ultimate destinations of the personal and sensitive data collected and shared by the websites was opaque, as it was not visible via an internet browser.

Research into the "data broker" industry shows that dozens of companies profit from buying and selling data to multiple clients who want to better understand users.

Experts believe that the predictive models built by the plethora of advertising and data-targeting companies may use ill health to profile and prey on users.

Recommended

Knowledge of an individual's medical ailments allows companies to try to sell specific treatments, services or financial products that desperate users might turn to.

"There is a whole system that will seek to take advantage of you because you're in a compromised state. I find that morally repugnant," said Tim Libert, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon university, who built the open source WebXray tool used by the FT, and specialises in the social and legal implications of online ad tracking.

Previous research in which Mr Libert analysed 80,000 unique pages relating to common diseases found that more than 91 per cent contacted third parties in the US. The paper explains that holding such sensitive data on a person can result in discriminatory marketing, even without marketers knowing their identity.

"As medical expenses leave many with less to spend on luxuries, these users may be segregated into 'data silos' of undesirables who are then excluded from favourable offers and prices," Mr Libert wrote. "This forms a subtle, but real, form of discrimination against those perceived to be ill."

In the UK, the online advertising industry was put on watch in June by the regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office. It gave the industry until December to clean up its data practices, or face further probes.

"This investigation by the Financial Times further highlights the ICO's concerns about the processing of special category data in online advertising, as well as the role that site owners and publishers play in this ecosystem," said Simon McDougall, the ICO's executive director for technology policy and innovation.

"Special category data - such as health information - requires greater protection because of its sensitivity and the increased risk of harm to or discrimination against individuals. We will be assessing the information provided by the FT before considering our next steps," he added.

The advertisers' defence

Google, which powers the online advertising industry, said that it "does not build advertising profiles from sensitive data . . . and has strict policies preventing advertisers from using such data to target ads".

It told the FT that the named sites investigated had been marked as "sensitive" internally, meaning the information that we found being sent to them was specifically excluded from the database used for personalised advertising. It said that its technology might be used to serve "contextual" ads, based on the contents of the page, but not user information.

The company explained that if a publisher chose to include information like the date of its visitor's last period in the URL, it could be sent to Google as part of an ad request from that page. But Google's ads systems would not understand what that URL data represents, nor use it to create profiles of users.

The sensitive data could be used for a variety of other reasons, including protecting against fraud and abuse and measuring the engagement with an advert, Google said.

Facebook, another frequent tracker across the sites we surveyed, which also received data on highly sensitive symptoms and diagnoses, was not able to confirm what it does with this information. "We don't want websites sharing people's personal health information with us - it's a violation of our rules, and we enforce against sites we find doing this," a company spokesperson said. "We're conducting an investigation and will take action against those sites in violation of our terms."

Methodology

Amazon said: "We do not use the information from publisher websites to inform advertising audience segments," but it did not confirm what it did with the sensitive data it received, such as user-input fertility information.

It was unclear if either Facebook or Amazon also received personal identifiers, such as an IP address or a unique ID, alongside health data.

The companies also emphasised that the publishers of the websites were required to manage user consent and the type of data sent to third parties.

"It's like a bar saying we don't like to serve people that are underage, they shouldn't come here to drink," Mr Libert said. "They are being negligent and it's deeply disingenuous."

Meanwhile the website publishers themselves did not provide details of why the data was being shared or what would be done with it once it left their hands. A WebMD spokesperson said: "[W]e only use, collect or share user information to the extent disclosed in our privacy policy." The policy reviewed by the FT did not appear to provide clear answers about the fate of the data.

Condensed comments from other companies that responded are published at the end of this article. Others contacted, including Lotame, ComScore, AppNexus, Drugs.com, Health.com and Bounty, did not respond to request for comment.

As the ICO's deadline for online ad auction firms to audit themselves approaches, it will be a time of reckoning for many in the industry that was until recently self-regulated.

"The internet has turned into a privacy wasteland. But there's a suspension of disbelief in the [ad] industry. Companies say they are GDPR-compliant, there's a codependency where everybody pretends everything is OK, but the deep technical architecture is fundamentally incompatible with the right to privacy," Mr Libert said.

"Ultimately it's going to be the ICO that decides, and based on early guidance, I suspect they may not be a willing participant in this fictional world built by online advertisers."

Further company responses

Big tech and personal data
Additional research by Edwin Esosa. Story produced by India Ross. The UK non-profit Privacy International also guided us on our methodology
Letter in response to this article:
Advertisers should reimburse us for our data / From Scott McArthur, Transformation coach, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, UK

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How top health websites are sharing sensitive data with advertisers

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Some of the UK's most popular health websites are sharing people's sensitive data - including medical symptoms, diagnoses, drug names and menstrual and fertility information - with dozens of companies around the world, ranging from ad-targeting giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Oracle, to lesser-known data-brokers and adtech firms like Scorecard and OpenX.

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Personal identities can now be measured through one's heartbeat

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Personal identities can now be measured through one's heartbeat

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B EFORE PULLING the trigger, a sniper planning to assassinate an enemy operative must be sure the right person is in the cross-hairs. Western forces commonly use software that compares a suspect's facial features or gait with those recorded in libraries of biometric data compiled by police and intelligence agencies. Such technology can, however, be foiled by a disguise, head-covering or even an affected limp. For this reason America's Special Operations Command ( SOC), which oversees the units responsible for such operations in the various arms of America's forces, has long wanted extra ways to confirm a potential target's identity. Responding to a request from SOC, the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office ( CTTSO), an agency of the defence department, has now developed a new tool for the job.

This system, dubbed Jetson, is able to measure, from up to 200 metres away, the minute vibrations induced in clothing by someone's heartbeat. Since hearts differ in both shape and contraction pattern, the details of heartbeats differ, too. The effect of this on the fabric of garments produces what Ideal Innovations, a firm involved in the Jetson project, calls a "heartprint"-a pattern reckoned sufficiently distinctive to confirm someone's identity.

To measure heartprints remotely Jetson employs gadgets called laser vibrometers. These work by detecting minute variations in a laser beam that has been reflected off an object of interest. They have been used for decades to study things like bridges, aircraft bodies, warship cannons and wind turbines-searching for otherwise-invisible cracks, air pockets and other dangerous defects in materials. However, only in the past five years or so has laser vibrometry become good enough to distinguish the vibrations induced in fabric by heartprints.

According to Jacob Khurgin of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, the best laser vibrometers can measure a displacement of just ten picometres (trillionths of a metre). His team's development of the necessary photonics-"a sexy word for optics", he says-has been paid for by the Office of Naval Research, the air force's Office of Scientific Research, and DARPA, another government defence-research outfit. Such precision cannot be obtained by the obvious means of measuring changes in the time it takes reflected light to travel to and from a surface. Instead, laser vibrometers detect changes, caused by the Doppler effect, in the reflected beam's frequency. If it is bouncing off something moving towards the detector, its frequency will be shifted to the blue end of the spectrum. If the reflective surface is moving away, the shift is to the red.

According to Candice Tresch, a spokeswoman for the CTTSO, SOC has now received its first batch of Jetson heartprint readers. Though keen to avoid "tipping our hand to an adversary", she is willing to give out some technical details. The beam involved is infrared, and therefore invisible to the human eye. The devices work best, she says, when a suspect is neither running nor in a moving vehicle. And they have a gimbal that helps keep the beam focused on the suspect for the 30 or so seconds it takes to obtain a good heartprint reading. She will not, however, discuss the process by which heartprint libraries might be built up in the first place. One starting point, presumably, would be to catalogue the heartbeats of detainees in the way that fingerprints and DNA samples are now taken routinely.

Confirming the identity of enemy targets is not the only job imaginable for this high-precision form of laser vibrometry. The stress of telling a falsehood can alter someone's heartbeat, so it could improve lie-detection technology, according to Wang Chen-chia, an engineer at Brimrose, another firm working on heartprint vibrometry. Dr Wang reckons that it might also be employed by customs officials, as the heartbeats of nervous smugglers are likely to differ from those of ordinary travellers. And it has potential medical uses, too. Brimrose hopes to run a clinical trial employing it for the detection of arrhythmia and other heart problems.

Nor need vibrometry be restricted to optical frequencies. A team at the State University of New York, Buffalo, led by Xu Wenyao, is designing a device that emits radio waves and captures return signals that have bounced off, and been modified by, a person's vibrating chest cavity. The advantage of this approach is that it can penetrate materials opaque to light waves, such as walls and heavy clothing. A prototype can, says Dr Xu, read heartprints from as far away as 50 metres.

Dr Xu envisages markets for the device ranging from cardiac diagnostics to the identification of authorised users of computers and vehicles. Governments, he says, could employ the technology to identify masked protesters. He does note, though, that this could be stymied by protesters wrapping their torsos in tinfoil-a version of the tinfoil hats allegedly loved by those paranoid about government snooping, perhaps. But this time, one that works.■

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "Finding it in one's heart"

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People can now be identified at a distance by their heartbeat

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B EFORE PULLING the trigger, a sniper planning to assassinate an enemy operative must be sure the right person is in the cross-hairs. Western forces commonly use software that compares a suspect's facial features or gait with those recorded in libraries of biometric data compiled by police and intelligence agencies.

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China has started collecting citizen's DNA to allegedly build a male DNA database, a biometric collection scheme that human rights activists fear may be a strategic tactic in the government's surveillance program, reports RFA.

According to online official records, local governments across China are purchasing a high number of medical kits and tools for DNA collection at an individual budget of 10 million yuan (U.S.$1.4 million). While some authorities chose to work with Chinese contractors, the report notes most opted for a collaboration with U.S. biotech firm Thermo Fisher.

In March 2019, fearing its products were being used in unintended ways and following concerns expressed by US senator Marco Rubio, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its technology to China and would further investigate the possible misuse of its technology.

When asked about the reasons behind the massive biometric collection operation, authorities' answers vary. Some responded that the data is used to build a database of family trees based on male relatives, a notice from Feidong police reads the program was initiated by the Communist Party, and other provinces claim the data is used to locate missing people and to increase police efficiency. In the province of Gungdong, DNA collection has been conducted on newborn babies since 2018 in order to emit an electronic birth certificate with DNA bar codes.

According to New York-based human right group HRW, China is already collecting DNA from its citizens through its annual physical exam.

"The mandatory data banking of a whole population's biodata, including DNA, is a gross violation of international human rights norms, and it's even more disturbing if it is done surreptitiously, under the guise of a free health care program," HRW China director Sophie Richardson said in 2018, following an investigative report.

"Chinese authorities seem to think they can achieve 'social stability' by placing people under a microscope, but these abusive programs are more likely to deepen hostility towards the government," said Richardson.

China analyst Willy Lam believes the government will use the information by combining it with artificial intelligence, other biometric technology, such as facial recognition, and the social credit system to design a nationwide surveillance operation.

After the use of biometric data registered an exponential growth in China, lawmakers began drafting a new data privacy law to protect personal information, and biometric data in particular.

Article Topics

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China ramps up nationwide biometric data collection

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China has started collecting citizen's DNA to allegedly build a male DNA database, a biometric collection scheme that human rights activists fear may be a strategic tactic in the government's surveillance program, reports RFA. According to online official records, local governments across China are purchasing a high number of medical kits and tools for DNA collection at an individual budget of 10 million yuan (U.S.$1.4 million).

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I n December 2015, thousands of tech entrepreneurs and analysts, along with a few international heads of state, gathered in Wuzhen, in southern China, for the country’s second World Internet Conference. At the opening ceremony the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, set out his vision for the future of China’s internet. “We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber-development,” said Xi, warning against foreign interference “in other countries’ internal affairs”.

No one was surprised by what they heard. Xi had already established that the Chinese internet would be a world unto itself, with its content closely monitored and managed by the Communist party. In recent years, the Chinese leadership has devoted more and more resources to controlling content online. Government policies have contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of postings on the Chinese blogging platform Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter), and have silenced many of China’s most important voices advocating reform and opening up the internet.

It wasn’t always like this. In the years before Xi became president in 2012, the internet had begun to afford the Chinese people an unprecedented level of transparency and power to communicate. Popular bloggers, some of whom advocated bold social and political reforms, commanded tens of millions of followers. Chinese citizens used virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked websites. Citizens banded together online to hold authorities accountable for their actions, through virtual petitions and organising physical protests. In 2010, a survey of 300 Chinese officials revealed that 70% were anxious about whether mistakes or details about their private life might be leaked online. Of the almost 6,000 Chinese citizens also surveyed, 88% believed it was good for officials to feel this anxiety.

For Xi Jinping, however, there is no distinction between the virtual world and the real world: both should reflect the same political values, ideals, and standards. To this end, the government has invested in technological upgrades to monitor and censor content. It has passed new laws on acceptable content, and aggressively punished those who defy the new restrictions. Under Xi, foreign content providers have found their access to China shrinking. They are being pushed out by both Xi’s ideological war and his desire that Chinese companies dominate the country’s rapidly growing online economy.

At home, Xi paints the west’s version of the internet, which prioritises freedom of information flow, as anathema to the values of the Chinese government. Abroad, he asserts China’s sovereign right to determine what constitutes harmful content. Rather than acknowledging that efforts to control the internet are a source of embarrassment – a sign of potential authoritarian fragility – Xi is trying to turn his vision of a “Chinanet” (to use blogger Michael Anti’s phrase) into a model for other countries.

The challenge for China’s leadership is to maintain what it perceives as the benefits of the internet – advancing commerce and innovation – without letting technology accelerate political change. To maintain his “Chinanet”, Xi seems willing to accept the costs in terms of economic development, creative expression, government credibility, and the development of civil society. But the internet continues to serve as a powerful tool for citizens seeking to advance social change and human rights. The game of cat-and-mouse continues, and there are many more mice than cats.

T he very first email in China was sent in September 1987 – 16 years after Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in the US. It broadcast a triumphal message: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.” For the first few years, the government reserved the internet for academics and officials. Then, in 1995, it was opened to the general public. In 1996, although only about 150,000 Chinese people were connected to the internet, the government deemed it the “Year of the Internet”, and internet clubs and cafes appeared all over China’s largest cities.

Yet as enthusiastically as the government proclaimed its support for the internet, it also took steps to control it. Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University, has noted that “As the internet became a publicly accessible information and communication platform, there was no debate about whether it should fall under government supervision – only about how such control would be implemented in practice.” By 1997, Beijing had enacted its first laws criminalising online postings that it believed were designed to hurt national security or the interests of the state.

China’s leaders were right to be worried. Their citizens quickly realised the political potential inherent in the internet. In 1998, a 30-year-old software engineer called Lin Hai forwarded 30,000 Chinese email addresses to a US-based pro-democracy magazine. Lin was arrested, tried and ultimately sent to prison in the country’s first known trial for a political violation committed completely online. The following year, the spiritual organisation Falun Gong used email and mobile phones to organise a silent demonstration of more than 10,000 followers around the Communist party’s central compound, Zhongnanhai, to protest their inability to practise freely. The gathering, which had been arranged without the knowledge of the government, precipitated an ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and a new determination to exercise control over the internet.

The man who emerged to lead the government’s technological efforts was Fang Binxing. In the late 1990s, Fang worked on developing the “Golden Shield” – transformative software that enabled the government to inspect any data being received or sent, and to block destination IP addresses and domain names. His work was rewarded by a swift political rise. By the 2000s, he had earned the moniker “Father of the Great Firewall” and, eventually, the enmity of hundreds of thousands of Chinese web users.

Security outside Google’s office in Beijing in January 2010. Photograph: Diego Azubel/EPA

Throughout the early 2000s, the Chinese leadership supplemented Fang’s technology with a set of new regulations designed to ensure that anyone with access to China’s internet played by Chinese rules. In September 2000, the state council issued order no 292, which required internet service providers to ensure that the information sent out on their services adhered to the law, and that some domain names and IP addresses were recorded. Two years later, Beijing blocked Google for the first time. (A few years later, Google introduced Google.cn, a censored version of the site.) In 2002, the government increased its emphasis on self-censorship with the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for China’s Internet Industry, which established four principles: patriotic observance of law, equitableness, trustworthiness and honesty. More than 100 companies, including Yahoo!, signed the pledge.

Perhaps the most significant development, however, was a 2004 guideline on internet censorship that called for Chinese universities to recruit internet commentators who could guide online discussions in politically acceptable directions and report comments that did not follow Chinese law. These commentators became known as wu mao dang, or “50-cent party”, after the small bonuses they were supposedly paid for each post.

Yet even as the government was striving to limit individuals’ access to information, many citizens were making significant inroads into the country’s political world – and their primary target was corrupt local officials.

I n May 2009, Deng Yujiao, a young woman working in a hotel in Hubei province, stabbed a party official to death after she rejected his efforts to pay her for sex and he tried to rape her. Police initially committed Deng to a mental hospital. A popular blogger, Wu Gan, however, publicised her case. Using information gathered through a process known as ren rou sousuo, or “human flesh search engine”, in which web users collaborate to discover the identity of a specific individual or organisation, Wu wrote a blog describing the events and actions of the party officials involved.

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine at the time, he commented: “The cultural significance of flesh searches is this: in an undemocratic country, the people have limited means to get information … [but] citizens can get access to information through the internet, exposing lies and the truth.” Deng’s case began to attract public support, with young people gathering in Beijing with signs reading “Anyone could be Deng Yujiao.” Eventually the court ruled that Deng had acted in self-defence.

During this period, in the final years of Hu Jintao’s presidency, the internet was becoming more and more powerful as a mechanism by which Chinese citizens held their officials to account. Most cases were like that of Deng Yujiao – lodged and resolved at the local level. A small number, however, reached central authorities in Beijing. On 23 July 2011, a high-speed train derailed in the coastal city of Wenzhou, leaving at least 40 people dead and 172 injured. In the wake of the accident, Chinese officials banned journalists from investigating, telling them to use only information “released from authorities”. But local residents took photos of the wreckage being buried instead of being examined for evidence. The photos went viral and heightened the impression that the government’s main goal was not to seek the true cause of the accident.

A Sina Weibo poll – later blocked – asked users why they thought the train wreckage was buried: 98% (61,382) believed it represented destruction of evidence. Dark humour spread online: “How far are we from heaven? Only a train ticket away,” and “The Ministry of Railways earnestly requests that you ride the Heavenly Party Express.” The popular pressure resulted in a full-scale investigation of the crash, and in late December, the government issued a report blaming poorly designed signal equipment and insufficient safety procedures. As many as 54 officials faced disciplinary action as a result of the crash.

The internet also provided a new sense of community for Chinese citizens, who mostly lacked robust civil-society organisations. In July 2012, devastating floods in Beijing led to the evacuation of more than 65,000 residents and the deaths of at least 77 people. Damages totalled an estimated $1.9bn. Local officials failed to respond effectively: police officers allegedly kept ticketing stranded cars instead of assisting residents, and the early warning system did not work. Yet the real story was the extraordinary outpouring of assistance from Beijing web users, who volunteered their homes and food to stranded citizens. In a span of just 24 hours, an estimated 8.8m messages were sent on Weibo regarding the floods. The story of the floods became not only one of government incompetence, but also one of how an online community could transform into a real one.

W hile the Chinese people explored new ways to use the internet, the leadership also began to develop a taste for the new powers it offered, such as a better understanding of citizens’ concerns and new ways to shape public opinion. Yet as the internet increasingly became a vehicle for dissent, concern within the leadership mounted that it might be used to mobilise a large-scale political protest capable of threatening the central government. The government responded with a stream of technological fixes and political directives; yet the boundaries of internet life continued to expand.

The advent of Xi Jinping in 2012 brought a new determination to move beyond deleting posts and passing regulations. Beijing wanted to ensure that internet content more actively served the interests of the Communist party. Within the virtual world, as in the real world, the party moved to silence dissenting voices, to mobilise party members in support of its values, and to prevent foreign ideas from seeping into Chinese political and social life. In a leaked speech in August 2013, Xi articulated a dark vision: “The internet has become the main battlefield for the public opinion struggle.”

Early in his tenure, Xi embraced the world of social media. One Weibo group, called Fan Group to Learn from Xi, appeared in late 2012, much to the delight of Chinese propaganda officials. (Many Chinese suspected that the account was directed by someone in the government, although the account’s owner denied it.) Xi allowed a visit he made to Hebei to be liveblogged on Weibo by government-affiliated press, and videos about Xi, including a viral music video called How Should I Address You, based on a trip he made to a mountain village, demonstrate the government’s increasing skill at digital propaganda.

Xi Jinping at the World Internet Conference in Jiaxing, China, in 2015. Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters

Under Xi, the government has also developed new technology that has enabled it to exert far greater control over the internet. In January 2015, the government blocked many of the VPNs that citizens had used to circumvent the Great Firewall. This was surprising to many outside observers, who had believed that VPNs were too useful to the Chinese economy – supporting multinationals, banks and retailers, among others – for the government to crack down on them.

In spring 2015, Beijing launched the Great Cannon. Unlike the Great Firewall, which has the capacity to block traffic as it enters or exits China, the Great Cannon is able to adjust and replace content as it travels around the internet. One of its first targets was the US coding and software development site GitHub. The Chinese government used the Great Cannon to levy a distributed denial of service attack against the site, overwhelming it with traffic redirected from Baidu (a search engine similar to Google). The attack focused on attempting to force GitHub to remove pages linked to the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times and GreatFire.org, a popular VPN that helps people circumvent Chinese internet censorship.

But perhaps Xi’s most noticeable gambit has been to constrain the nature of the content available online. In August 2013, the government issued a new set of regulations known as the “seven baselines”. The reaction by Chinese internet companies was immediate. Sina, for example, shut down or “handled” 100,000 Weibo accounts found to not comply with the new rules.

The government also adopted tough restrictions on internet-based rumours. In September 2013, the supreme people’s court ruled that authors of online posts that deliberately spread rumours or lies, and were either seen by more than 5,000 individuals or shared more than 500 times, could face defamation charges and up to three years in jail. Following massive flooding in Hebei province in July 2016, for example, the government detained three individuals accused of spreading “false news” via social media regarding the death toll and cause of the flood. Some social media posts and photos of the flooding, particularly of drowning victims, were also censored.

In addition, Xi’s government began targeting individuals with large social media followings who might challenge the authority of the Communist party. Restrictions on the most prominent Chinese web influencers, beginning in 2013, represented an important turning point in China’s internet life. Discussions began to move away from politics to personal and less sensitive issues. The impact on Sina Weibo was dramatic. According to a study of 1.6 million Weibo users, the number of Weibo posts fell by 70% between 2011 and 2013.

T he strength of the Communist party’s control over the internet rests above all on its commitment to prevent the spread of information that it finds dangerous. It has also adopted sophisticated technology, such as the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield. Perhaps its most potent source of influence, however, is the cyber-army it has developed to implement its policies.

The total number of people employed to monitor opinion and censor content on the internet – a role euphemistically known as “internet public opinion analyst” – was estimated at 2 million in 2013. They are employed across government propaganda departments, private corporations and news outlets. One 2016 Harvard study estimated that the Chinese government fabricates and posts approximately 448m comments on social media annually. A considerable amount of censorship is conducted through the manual deletion of posts, and an estimated 100,000 people are employed by both the government and private companies to do just this.

Private companies also play an important role in facilitating internet censorship in China. Since commercial internet providers are so involved in censoring the sites that they host, internet scholar Guobin Yang argues that “it may not be too much of a stretch to talk about the privatisation of internet content control”. The process is made simpler by the fact that several major technology entrepreneurs also hold political office. For example, Robin Li of Baidu is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory legislature, while Lei Jun, founder and CEO of mobile phone giant Xiaomi, is a representative of the National People’s Congress.

Yet Xi’s growing control over the internet does not come without costs. An internet that does not work efficiently or limits access to information impedes economic growth. China’s internet is notoriously unreliable, and ranks 91st in the world for speed. As New Yorker writer Evan Osnos asked in discussing the transformation of the Chinese internet during Xi’s tenure: “How many countries in 2015 have an internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?”

Scientific innovation, particularly prized by the Chinese leadership, may also be at risk. After the VPN crackdown, a Chinese biologist published an essay that became popular on social media, entitled Why Do Scientists Need Google? He wrote: “If a country wants to make this many scientists take out time from the short duration of their professional lives to research technology for climbing over the Great Firewall and to install and to continually upgrade every kind of software for routers, computers, tablets and mobile devices, no matter that this behaviour wastes a great amount of time; it is all completely ridiculous.”

More difficult to gauge is the cost the Chinese leadership incurs to its credibility. Web users criticising the Great Firewall have used puns to mock China’s censorship system. Playing off the fact that the phrases “strong nation” and “wall nation” share a phonetic pronunciation in Chinese (qiangguo), some began using the phrase “wall nation” to refer to China. Those responsible for seeking to control content have also been widely mocked. When Fang opened an account on Sina Weibo in December 2010, he quickly closed the account after thousands of online users left “expletive-laden messages” accusing him of being a government hack. Censors at Sina Weibo blocked “Fang Binxing” as a search term; one Twitter user wrote: “Kind of poetic, really, the blocker, blocked.” When Fang delivered a speech at Wuhan University in central China in 2011, a few students pelted him with eggs and a pair of shoes.

Nonetheless, the government seems willing to bear the economic and scientific costs, as well as potential damage to its credibility, if it means more control over the internet. For the international community, Beijing’s cyber-policy is a sign of the challenge that a more powerful China presents to the liberal world order, which prioritises values such as freedom of speech. It also reflects the paradox inherent in China’s efforts to promote itself as a champion of globalisation, while simultaneously advocating a model of internet sovereignty and closing its cyber-world to information and investment from abroad.

Adapted from The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State by Elizabeth C Economy, published by Oxford University Press and available at guardianbookshop.com

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The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown

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The long read: Before Xi Jinping, the internet was becoming a more vibrant political space for Chinese citizens. But today the country has the largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world

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WHO on TikTok to teach kids about Coronavirus

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WHO on TikTok to teach kids about Coronavirus

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On Friday, the World Health Organization made its debut on TikTok in an effort to combat rampant disinformation about the coronavirus.

The news: The WHO launched its TikTok presence with a video on Friday about what coronavirus is, and a follow-up video on Saturday about when and how to wear a mask. By Monday, the account had garnered nearly 162,000 followers and 1.2 million likes.

The WHO doesn't quite get it: While TikTok is known for its punchy short loop videos featuring pranks, sarcasm, and dancing, the WHO's launch on the platform was rather stoic. In the first video, Benedetta Allegranzi, the technical lead of infection prevention and control, simply runs through basic facts about the coronavirus. It's all very "public service announcement" in tone. The second video is plainer still, featuring some elevator music and slides detailing when and how a person should wear a face mask, with a demonstration by April Baller of the WHO Health Emergency Program.

We shouldn't mock. The WHO joining TikTok is important. As we reported last month, misinformation is rampant on social media, with videos of teens faking the coronavirus, snowballing conspiracy theories about the source and spread of the virus, and general racism and xenophobia. That's made it tough for people to figure out what's reliable and true. An attempt to reach teens on the dominant video platform makes sense.

What else? Searching for coronavirus-adjacent terms on TikTok leads to a banner page titled "Prevent coronavirus: Learn the facts about coronavirus," with credible links to more information organized by country.

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The WHO got on TikTok to teach teens about coronavirus

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On Friday, the World Health Organization made its debut on TikTok in an effort to combat rampant disinformation about the coronavirus. The news: The WHO launched its TikTok presence with a video on Friday about what coronavirus is, and a follow-up video on Saturday about when and how to wear a mask.

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Zhejiang Hangzhou No 11 High School, on the fringes of downtown Hangzhou in eastern China, is a green, peaceful-seeming place to learn. Gazebo-like structures nestle among lush foliage; grey stone sculptures enact eternal dioramas and Japanese maples gently fan placid lakes.

It is also a digital panopticon. A surveillance system, powered by facial recognition and artificial intelligence, tracks the state school's 1,010 pupils, informing teachers which students are late or have missed class, while in the café, their menu choices leave a digital dietary footprint that staff can monitor to see who is gorging on too much fatty food.

In May, The People's Daily, a state-run media group, tweeted approvingly about the school's use of cameras to monitor, via their facial expressions, how children were engaging in class. Had this classroom-based part of the programme not been abruptly halted later that month in the wake of local controversy, it would also have been deployed to predict which pupils (the slouching ones) were likely to underperform.

Welcome to China, where AI is being pressed into service as handmaiden to an authoritarian government. For many critics, this seems fraught with danger: an Orwellian world where "Big Brother" is always watching, able to spy on anyone from human rights lawyers to political dissidents and persecuted minorities. For supporters, it is near utopian: a land where criminals and miscreants are easily weeded out, where no one can cheat, where good behaviour is rewarded and the bad punished.

The latter vision is the Chinese government's stated aim. By 2020, a national video surveillance network will be "omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable", according to an official paper released in 2015.

The idea of constant monitoring is not unprecedented in China. Indeed, the name of the government's 2020 project - xueliang, or "sharp eyes" - is a throwback to a Communist party slogan, "The people have sharp eyes", referencing the totalitarian ploy of encouraging neighbours to spy on their neighbours.

Under Mao Zedong, cities were split into grids of socialist work units where access to rations, housing and other benefits was enforced by local spies who reported wayward behaviour from their neighbours. This system of social control had in turn been built on a model of communal self-policing introduced centuries before, during the Song dynasty.

In the old days at least you had somewhere you could hide, or where you can do your private things. But now the assumption is people know where you are

Feng Xiang, legal scholar

Today, the grid system has been revived, manned by an extensive network of volunteer and part-time lookouts. In more troubled regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet, armed police booths dot street corners. Beijing has about 850,000 "informants" patrolling its streets, according to state media. Renewing these old-school tactics is a deliberate decision: the government knows that while surveillance technology is advancing rapidly, it is far from perfect.

Cheetah Mobile is a Chinese company whose subsidiary's facial-recognition vending machine scored top in an international facial-recognition test last year sponsored by Microsoft Research. But Fu Sheng, its founder and chief executive, concedes it has a long way to go in terms of spotting faces in crowds. "The human is an excellent product," he tells the FT. "No technology can exceed it."

That may not matter. When the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisaged his panopticon penitentiary in the late 18th century - a circular building with an inspection tower at its centre - the idea was that inmates would never know if they were being observed or not. This "simple idea in architecture" would offer "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind", Bentham wrote. For some analysts looking at the impact of China's growing surveillance state, any technological shortcomings are incidental. Like the panopticon itself, it is the fear of being watched that is the most powerful tool of all.

"There's a wave of enhanced surveillance going on worldwide," says Rogier Creemers, who studies Chinese governance at Leiden University. The difference in China is the historical context: "Liberal democratic institutions are based on the notion that state power must lie in the hands of the population. There are things the state is just not supposed to know or do," he says. "China starts from a different point of view - that a strong empowered state is necessary, in order to drag the nation forward. In China, surveillance is almost a logical extension of what the state is supposed to do, because the state is supposed to keep people safe."

Feng Xiang is translating the Old Testament book of Jeremiah when the FT visits his office at Beijing's Tsinghua University. A prominent legal scholar, he has been studying AI and its implications for jobs, society and capitalism in China.

His view is a gloomy one. As he sees it, public surveillance via CCTV cameras is being rapidly supplemented by a range of more insidious data collectors-cum-tracking devices: the smartphones in almost half of all Chinese citizens' pockets. This will eventually create a world devoid of privacy.

"It's not like [George] Orwell's 1984, but it's like a new way of life," says Feng, noting that even a hike in a scenic park or up a mountain in China today can involve mandatory fingerprinting by police. "In the old days at least you had somewhere you could hide, or where you can do your private things. But now the assumption is people know where you are."

Against the backdrop of deepening surveillance, the Chinese government is introducing a " social credit system ". First described in an official document in 2014 and now being piloted in various forms in several cities, the idea is that people will ultimately be scored based on past behaviour, taking in misdemeanours such as traffic offences and court records.

At present, a good financial credit score, handed out by some companies and operating rather like a loyalty programme, can confer benefits such as waived deposits on shared bikes or preferential loan rates. A poor social credit score, by comparison, could jeopardise a university place, rule out certain jobs and even limit travel: more than 10.5 million people have been barred from buying airline or high-speed train tickets, according to the Supreme Court, since a debtors blacklist was launched.

In troubled regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet, armed police booths dot street corners. Beijing alone has about 850,000 informants that patrol its streets

Meanwhile, the technology by which the government can track people is constantly evolving. Facial recognition is increasingly used to unlock smartphones in China, and thanks to its multiple commercial applications - from allowing easy payment in a grocery store to home security - it has attracted a slew of venture capital from across the world. One tech banker dismisses facial recognition to the FT as "kindergarten stuff" compared with what will come next.

Some of China's leading facial-recognition players, for example, are now moving into gait recognition. Hanwang Technology was an early entrant in the field: it was forced to rethink its fingerprint-recognition technology when the Sars epidemic of 2003 left people in China terrified of physical contact.

"We can see the human figure and his gait, so if his cap is pulled down [we] can still recognise him," explains Liu Changping, president of the Beijing-based company. The Chinese authorities already have a decent video database to build on, he adds: "If [someone] was put in prison before, there's video of him walking around."

Although China is expanding its surveillance network nationwide, it is in the western region of Xinjiang that the technology is being put to its most extreme use. The region has been closely policed since 2009, when deadly riots broke out between the 11 million-strong Muslim Uighur population and the minority Han Chinese. Xinjiang is a vast region, and a relatively poor one, making the multitude of gleaming cameras and sophisticated technology - inside bazaars, schools and even mosques - all the more incongruous amid the expanses of desert and empty roads.

Residents were unwilling to talk on the record about their experiences, for fear of repercussions, but it is clear that normal life has changed irrevocably for the Uighurs. Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and film-maker who fled China and is now based in the US, tells the FT about the day he and his wife were ordered to visit their local police station and leave voice recordings, fingerprints, DNA swabs and, of course, high-resolution video footage of their faces making various expressions.

"I am a director, I make films, and I have seen many kinds of cameras. But I had never seen a camera that strange. They adjusted [the] camera to my eye level. They had me look up and look forward and down, left and right and back," Hamut recalls. "They did the same for females . . . they had the women pucker their lips and filmed that. Every step had to be completed perfectly; each expression could not be done too quickly or slowly. If you made a face too fast, the computer would ask you to stop and have you repeat it again. I had to try many times. Many people had to spend an hour to complete this facial filming."

Mandatory surveillance software is installed on residents' mobile phones to scan for Islamic keywords and pictures. Some people told the FT that anyone found to have shared illicit material would be sent to the region's extensive network of extralegal detention camps, where tens of thousands of Uighurs have already been imprisoned. Making too many phone calls to or from anywhere outside of Xinjiang can also result in detention. As a result, Uighurs living in Xinjiang can go years without speaking to family members working in coastal cities like Beijing or Shanghai.

Facial recognition, intrusive as it is, is only one of the tools the authorities are using to monitor residents. Last year police were told to conduct DNA swabs, iris scans and blood tests using a specially designed mobile app and health checks, in order to build a region-wide biometric database.

None of this is cheap. Overall public security spending in the region was Rmb57.95bn ($9.16bn) in 2017, a 10-fold increase over the previous decade. That has proved a windfall for Chinese security companies. The government's investment in public-private partnerships in security has also increased, from $27.3m in 2015 to at least $1.1bn in 2017, based on a tally of existing public tenders and Bank of China data. Among the largest of these privately funded projects is in Xinjiang's Shache county, where almost 100 people were killed in 2014 in what state media called a terrorist attack. The network there will include a video surveillance centre, cloud storage facilities and a drone system.

Smaller companies are also getting a slice of the action, especially government-backed start-ups with the right connections. Meiya Pico, a private company based in the coastal Fujian province, was selected to develop a desktop version of the mobile-surveillance software that Xinjiang residents were forced to download this year. The software is now installed on the computers of all public companies and academic institutions. Several Xinjiang academics told the FT that authorities are now alerted if illicit files are accessed.

In Xinjiang, mandatory surveillance software is installed on residents' mobile phones to scan for Islamic keywords and pictures

Meiya Pico's management frequently meets with high-level officials from the Communist party and the state security apparatus, according to articles and pictures on its website. Indeed, many Chinese tech companies talk proudly of working to further the government's aims.

"Our business is dictated by the political requirements of our country. 'Maintaining stability' is China's national security priority so Xinjiang really needs our products. The province is our largest client by far," says Wang Wufei, a sales director at X-Face, a Shenzhen-based company that makes facial-recognition software and hardware. In June, X-Face won a contract to supply 200 security checkpoints in Xinjiang.

Scarier still is what comes next. A Shenzhen start-up making grenade-bearing drones predicts the Xinjiang authorities will become its largest client. Another, Xinjiang-based Zhenkong, which specialises in signal-interference technology and has received funding from the Xinjiang border police, sounds a bellicose note. "The government needs entrepreneurs like us," says Ge Guangxu, its president. "There is no second place in war. We need to be prepared."

Three centuries ago, Jeremy Bentham suggested his panopticon would lead to "morals reformed . . . industry invigorated . . . public burthens lightened". China's facial-technology players sound an eerily similar note. Megvii and SenseTime, two of the country's biggest facial-recognition companies, claim their technology has apprehended thousands of criminals - all without the need for armies of people to watch hours and hours of CCTV footage. Both have attracted billions of dollars in funding, from Chinese and Russian state funds as well as stars of the Chinese tech scene such as Alibaba.

Qi Yin, co-founder and chief executive of Megvii, notes the myriad uses of his company's Face++ technology, such as in fintech payments. But for him, surveillance is king: "I believe this will be the largest one in the next three years." Megvii counts on the government for 40 per cent of its business and describes its work as profiling rather than just identifying. Someone who regularly appears in video from a subway station but is not an employee could be a thief, says Xie Yinan, a vice-president at Face++, and the information - in the form of code - is sent to the police.

There is even demand among insurers to use the smart glasses to recognise cows - farmers have been known to claim insurance on the same deceased bovine twice

One of the surveillance industry's recent - and much publicised - success stories took place at a pop concert in eastern China. While Jacky Cheung, a Hong Kong pop star (rebranded a "fugitive trapper" by the Chinese media) crooned, cameras were automatically sweeping the audience.

Facial-recognition technology picked out four men accused of crimes - including a ticket scalper and a greengrocer accused of a Rmb110,000 potato scam in 2015. "Smiling as he approached his idol, he did not realise he had already been spotted," Jiaxing police gloated in a social-media post.

Aside from its uses in law enforcement, AI-aided surveillance is also being touted as a tool for industry. Hanwang Technology, China's grandfather of facial recognition, has sold its surveillance system to construction sites, enabling managers to track how many hours workers are on site and who is slacking.

Another company, LLVision, produces smart sunglasses with built-in facial recognition; these became famous after police in Zhengzhou were photographed wearing them to monitor travellers at train stations earlier this year. But the company has also been supplying them to manufacturing plants for use in time management and quality control.

"[Even] if you have 10,000 people checking [machines and workforces] globally, they cannot manage and audit and analyse their checking," says Fei Wu, chief executive and founder of LLVision. "Nor can you see that worker A is working faster than worker B, or how you get more people to work like worker A."

Wu, a graduate of the UK's Birmingham University, raised money to produce the sunglasses through crowdfunding and spent three years trialling them. They have been worn by surgeons in theatre to record or broadcast surgery. There is even demand among insurers, he says, to use the glasses to recognise cows - farmers have been known to claim insurance on the same deceased bovine twice.

But, as with so many other Chinese companies in this field, a key client for LLVision is the Public Security Bureau. Think of it, says Wu. There are almost 1.4 billion people in China. "But the PSB is done by a few million people. Medical treatment is done by a few million people. Education is done by a few million people . . . There's a huge gap to fill, so tech must play a big role."

As the technology to enable mass surveillance and identification becomes more sophisticated, governments across the world will face dilemmas over when and how to use it. One overseas minister on a trip to China was awed by the technology he was shown, according to Wu, briefly fretting at his country's strict privacy rules before concluding that in the case of a wanted criminal, everyone would want him to be caught.

Germany unleashed a wave of criticism when it began piloting facial recognition to help track and catch suspected terrorists, while the UK's independent CCTV watchdog wrote to police chiefs last year raising concerns about the increasing use of facial-recognition technology to monitor crowds. Earlier this year, about 40 civil liberties groups wrote to Amazon urging it to halt sales of its Rekognition software, which the company has promoted as offering "real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos". The product, which has been sold to a number of US police forces, "poses a grave threat to communities, including people of colour and immigrants", the campaigners said.

Then there are China's own exports, particularly to developing countries under the " One Belt One Road " initiative. One such deal, to Zimbabwe, could highlight another key problem with facial-recognition technology, which learns according to the data it is fed: an MIT and Stanford University study found error rates of 20-34 per cent for determining the gender of darker-skinned women compared with less than 1 per cent for light-skinned men.

The rise of mass surveillance yields reams of data, and therein lies one of the big dangers for any country going down this road, says Nuala O'Connor, chief executive of the US-based Center for Democracy and Technology. "The risks are the creation of a pervasive and permanent database of individual images for law enforcement, but then used for other purposes, perhaps by government actors," she says.

Some 530 surveillance patents were filed by Chinese groups last year, more than five times the number in the US

Some 530 camera and video surveillance patents were filed by Chinese groups last year, according to the research firm CB Insights - more than five times the number applied for in the US. Unhindered by worries about privacy or individual rights, China's deepening specialism has attracted global customers and investors. "The surveillance industry is still in the growth phase," proclaimed analysts at Jefferies, the New York-based investment bank.

Hikvision, a company majority owned by two Chinese state entities whose surveillance systems have been used everywhere from Xinjiang to US military bases, was selected to join the MSCI Emerging Markets Index - a global equity benchmark - in June. Its Chinese-listed shares have risen nearly fivefold over five years.

In Hangzhou, a start-up called Rokid is preparing to release augmented-reality glasses next year. Outside its lakeside office, the company's founder Mingming Zhu - known as Misa - demonstrates a prototype pair to the FT. The glasses are aimed at consumers rather than law enforcement: walking into a party, for example, their facial-recognition technology means you could immediately see the names of guests superimposed above their heads; the glasses could potentially also add information from their social-media feeds.

They look cool, but there is something spooky about getting the lowdown on people without so much as a "hello", and Misa sounds a note of caution. "We are making something happen but we have to be very careful. With AI we have a bright side and a dark side. The most difficult thing you are working on right now might bring you to someplace wrong."
Louise Lucas is the FT's Asia technology correspondent; Emily Feng is an FT correspondent in Beijing Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos This story has been corrected to state that the Sars epidemic occurred in 2003

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Zhejiang Hangzhou No 11 High School, on the fringes of downtown Hangzhou in eastern China, is a green, peaceful-seeming place to learn. Gazebo-like structures nestle among lush foliage; grey stone sculptures enact eternal dioramas and Japanese maples gently fan placid lakes. It is also a digital panopticon.

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WeChat - the app that's always watching 

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WeChat - the app that's always watching 

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WeChat: The App That’s Always Watching You | China Uncensored

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Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party's Data-Driven Power Expansion.

Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world's knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes... that's not really happened has it?
Bill Clinton said that, for China, controlling free speech online would be like "nailing Jell-O to the wall". I wish he had been right. But unfortunately, there was too much focus on the great firewall of China and not enough on how the Chinese Communist party was trying to shape its external environment.

When did China pivot from seeing the internet as a US-generated threat to something it could use to discipline and punish its own population?
It's not just the internet, it's technology in general. If you go back to even the late 1970s and early 80s, the way the Chinese Communist party (CCP) talks about technology is as a tool of social management. It's a way of not only coercive control, but also sort of cooperative control where you participate in your own management. It's this idea of shaping the environment, shaping how people think, how they're willing to act before they even know they're making a choice. That's the party's idea.

When did that develop into what is called the social credit system?
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin spokeabout this in 2000. He said we need a social credit system to merge rule by law and rule by virtue. I don't see it as different from the way Hannah Arendt describes how regimes attempt to make the law inseparable from ethics in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

How does the social credit system work for the average citizen? As they are going about their lives, are they continually earning and losing points based on their behaviour?
A pop cultural reference might be the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. But it isn't the same. It's not really a number score that goes up and down. There are multiple inputs. So you have, say, legal inputs, like a court record, and financial inputs. Then there are third-party inputs, such as surveillance video or data about your sentiment on social media. The system includes blacklists, records on public websites, and platforms to support decisions on creditworthiness that integrate things like "sentiment analysis". This applies to companies and individuals. Muji's Shanghai branch had a mark of dishonesty on its credit record with the Shanghai government because one of its products was labelled "Made in Taiwan".

The number of people affected is enormous: 17.5 million people were prevented from buying flights in 2018. Is there much pushback from the Chinese population about this system?
An average person might not see how it's affecting them yet. Social credit is technology augmenting existing control methods. So if you're used to that system, you aren't necessarily seeing the change yet. Blacklists aren't new, but the technology supporting this social management is. And over time, as it becomes more effective, that's where more people will notice the impact.

So there isn't much concept of user privacy or anonymising data in China?
Privacy matters to the average Chinese citizen and there are privacy regulations in place. But privacy stops where the party's power begins. And so, you know, the party state might put controls on how companies can share data. But again privacy stops where the party's power begins. And that's a huge difference in the system.

One thing that's interesting to keep in mind is the system itself. When we think about China's authoritarianism, we think about surveillance cameras, we think about facial recognition. But we forget that a lot of the technology involved provides convenience. And control happens for convenience. Some of the technologies involved in increasing the party's power are actually providing services - maybe Mussolini and his timely trains is a useful way of thinking about it.

The most egregious example of this surveillance technology would be in Xinjiang for controlling the Ui ghur [Muslim] population?
The most visibly coercive forms of what the party is doing are unfolding in Xinjiang. It's a virtual police state. There are QR codes on people's doors for when the party goes in to check on who is in. Some researchers have found that if someone leaves through the back door instead of the front door, that can be considered suspicious behaviour.

Is the wider Chinese population aware of how the technology is being used in Xinjiang? Do they realise this is a more enhanced version of what we've got in their own lives?
I don't think people are aware of how bad it is. A lot of people don't believe Western reporting. If they see it. Even if they do believe it, propaganda has shaped a bad public opinion of the Uighurs.

Do you think the Chinese Communist party has a file on you?
I imagine that they probably have a file on a lot of outspoken researchers. I try not to think about what mine would look like. In general, a lot of researchers on China have a fear, whether it's conscious or unconscious, about losing access or the ability to go to China.

You have written about your fears that a commercial deal struck between Huawei and a Turkish mobile operator could be used to monitor the exiled Ui ghur population in Turkey.
Chinese tech giants like Huawei are signing agreements for smart cities globally - in April we at Aspi counted 75. These agreements include public security, licence-plate and facial recognition tools. As a local government you're taking what is the cheapest and best product for your city. You're deploying it in ways you've decided are reasonable, but what might be forgotten is that these services require data to be sent back to the company to keep it up to date - and who else has access to that data once the manufacturer has it? One agreement was made with Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. Turkey has about 10,000 Uighurs living in exile - that system could be used to further control and harass exiles and family members in China.

More generally, I found that the party central propaganda department has made cooperation agreements with a number of major Chinese tech companies. As their products are bedded in they become ways of collecting tons of data. A language translation tool, for instance, doesn't sound like a surveillance tool but it's a way to collect a lot of data. Technically it's not different from what Google does but their intent is different - it's about state security.

So western governments should be wary of installing Chinese-designed tech infrastructure in their cities?
Yes. It's perhaps uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge, but the party is very clear about its intent. Its intent relates to state security. The party talks about "discourse power" - the party's version of the truth being the only thing that's accepted. The Chinese government ultimately controls all Chinese companies through its security legislation. You might be comfortable with someone collecting data to tailor advertising to you, but are you comfortable with sharing your data with a regime that has 1.5 million Uighurs imprisoned on the basis of their ethnic identity?

So we should be cautious about buying Chinese smartphones and smart home products?
I would be. You may think "I'm not researching the CCP or testifying in Congress, so I don't have anything to worry about". But you don't really know how that data is being collected and potentially used to shape your opinion and shape your decisions, among other things. Even understanding advertising and consumer preferences can feed into propaganda. Taken together, that can be used to influence an election or feelings about a particular issue.

Some of these elements of monitoring and nudging are present in western life. For instance, fitness tracking that earns you discounts on health insurance, or local authorities using machine learning to identify potential abuse victims. Should we be careful about letting this stuff into society?
We need to be very careful. It's easy to see what the benefits are, but we aren't adequately defining the risks. Some of the problems can be dealt with by introducing more data literacy programmes, so that individuals understand, say, the privacy issues concerning a home-security camera.

The Chinese party state is going to take advantage of the weaknesses in liberal democracies, whether they're legal or cultural. They take advantage of our really weak data privacy laws. GDPR is a good step, but it doesn't really deal with the core problem of technology that's providing a service. By its nature the company providing the service collects and uses data. Who has access to that data, their ability to process it, and their intent is the problem.
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Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone

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Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party's Data-Driven Power Expansion. Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world's knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes...

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Yi Tingyue has a lot going for her. She won a scholarship to China's prestigious Sichuan University, where she graduated with a master's in graphic design. She drives an Audi A4 and owns a penthouse apartment on the outskirts of provincial capital Chengdu. Vacations are spent touring Japan, Thailand and the U.S. Little wonder Yi is an 805.

That's the score assigned to Yi by Sesame Credit, which is run by Jack Ma's online-shopping empire Alibaba, placing the 22-year-old near the top of the scheme's roughly 500 million-strong user base. Sesame determines a credit-score ranking-from 350 to a theoretical 950-dependent on "a thousand variables across five data sets," according to the firm.

Unlike Western-style credit systems, Sesame takes in a broad range of behaviors both financial and social, all underwritten by an invisible web of Big Data. It's the most prominent in a rising network of social-credit-score systems in China that are dramatically expanding the concept of creditworthiness-and raising fears internationally about Orwellian overreach by an autocratic regime.

In China, cash has long been king. As recently as 2011, only 1 in 3 Chinese people had a bank account. The nation's rapid rise from collectivized penury to the world's No. 2 economy meant it never had the chance to develop Western-style credit histories. That meant people could default on loans,
or sell shoddy or counterfeit goods, with few repercussions. Society was dogged by a question: Whom can you trust?

In 2015, the government set about addressing this by allowing eight companies-including Sesame parent Ant Financial-to run trial commercial credit scores. The official guidance called for a nationwide system that would "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step," to be in place by 2020.

Data, of course, is key. As Sesame had access to the records of Alibaba's mobile-payment app Alipay, which today boasts over 1 billion users worldwide, the company stole an easy march on its rivals in China. The system functions like a frequent-flyer scheme on steroids-one that transforms all of society into a first-class lounge. High scorers like Yi enjoy a bevy of perks. She can rent cars without a deposit, get better rates of foreign exchange and even skip hospital waiting lines. Rail stations have special waiting rooms for high Sesame scorers. For a time, high scorers could use a designated security queue at Beijing airport.

Yi keeps her score high in part by traditional brand loyalty: using Alipay wherever she goes and investing in the firm's savings fund. But Sesame's scheme doesn't merely encourage good behavior. Yi fears "unsociable" behavior might also impact her score; she says she "wouldn't dream" of parking a shareable bike in an undesignated place, for example.

The fear stems from the fact that as commercial credit systems like Sesame have started taking off in China, around half a dozen local authorities have launched pilot credit systems specifically designed to socially engineer behavior. These, too, ascribe a number to citizens. Good deeds gain points; bad deeds lose them, with perks and hardships attached. If you fall afoul of a pilot system, you cannot get a loan or mortgage, even if your offense is nonfinancial, like quarreling with neighbors. Conversely, nonfinancial "good deeds"-like giving blood-can cause your loan's interest rate to drop.

This overlapping mishmash of commercial and state-run systems has stoked fears that China's autocratic Communist Party is planning by 2020 to implement a single citizen score using opaque algorithms that's largely political. In a speech Oct. 4, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence described it as
"an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually
every facet of human life."

In fact, China's social-credit scoring is best understood not as a single system but as an overarching ideology: encompassing punishments and rewards, to improve governance and stamp out disorder and fraud. Commercial schemes mostly handle the perks, state schemes the punishments. Both work in concert to encourage socially responsible behavior.

But they are undeniably intrusive. Government agencies compile and share data on judgments against individuals or companies. Fail to pay a fine or court-ordered compensation, or default on your debts, and you will be put on the "List of Untrustworthy Persons." Blacklisted individuals cannot make "luxury purchases," such as high-speed rail and air tickets or hotel rooms. Five million people have been barred from high-speed trains and 17 million from flights under the scheme, according to the official website. "The ripple effect on every part of your life becomes a multiplier on punishments," says professor Frank Pasquale, a Big Data expert at the University of Maryland.

And some elements are indeed worthy of dystopian fiction. In certain areas of China, call a blacklisted person on the phone and you will hear a siren and recorded message saying: "Warning, this person is on the blacklist. Be careful and urge them to repay their debts." When a blacklisted person crosses certain intersections in Beijing, facial-recognition technology projects their face and ID number on massive electronic billboards. Beijing-based lawyer Li Xiaolin was blacklisted after a court apology he gave was deemed "insincere." Unable to buy tickets, he was stranded 1,200 miles from home.
"It was ridiculous," he says.

Although it sounds draconian, the repercussions of blacklisting "tend to be coercive rather than punitive," China legal scholar Jeremy Daum says. Once you've complied with the court ruling, you're theoretically scrubbed from the blacklist (although many report that this is easier said than done). Essentially, the system utilizes technology to enforce existing legal prohibitions through shame and hardship rather than by adding a new layer of arbitrary regulation. Despite being blacklisted himself, Li is in favor of the system overall. "It's good for society," he says.

The fear, however, is that it will also be good for a Chinese government eager to quash free speech and root out dissenters. Under the state systems, "spreading rumors" is disproportionately penalized. In one region, neighborhoods have dedicated watchers to record deeds and misdeeds. As the state continues to persecute religious minorities like the Uighurs and silence outspoken academics, the worry is what metrics the social-credit systems may extend to next.

Still, for now people like Yi are happy to relish the newfound order that a social-credit score can bring-as well as enjoy the perks. "At first I worried about all my information being exposed," says Yi, sipping free Starbucks coffee courtesy of Sesame's loyalty points. "But then I thought, I'm just a normal kid, a regular person. What harm could there be?"

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How China Is Using Big Data to Create a Social Credit Score

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Find out how China is using Big Data to reward - and punish - its citizens.

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Chinese police are using a mobile app to keep data on millions of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a report released on Thursday, HRW said it had reverse engineered the app to see how mass surveillance worked.

The app is used to closely monitor behaviours, it said, including lack of socialising, using too much electricity or having acquaintances abroad.

Rights groups say Uighur Muslims are being severely persecuted in China.

The UN has said there are credible reports up to a million Uighurs are being held in detention in Xinjiang, in what China says are "re-education centres".

'Most intrusive surveillance system'

According to the rights group's report, the app is used by officials to record and file away information about people.

In particular, it targets "36 person types" that authorities should pay attention to.

These include people who seldom use their front door, use an abnormal amount of electricity and those that have gone on Hajj - an Islamic pilgrimage - without state authorisation.

The report does not make explicit mention of any ethnic groups specifically targeted, but the "36 person types" include "unofficial" imams - Islamic leaders - and those who follow Wahhabism, an Islamic doctrine.

The information taken from the app will be fed into the central system of the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) - the main system for mass surveillance in Xinjiang, says HRW.

HRW senior China researcher Maya Wang said IJOP was "one of the world's most intrusive mass surveillance systems".

"It gathers information from checkpoints on the street, gas stations, schools... pulls information from these facilities and monitors them for 'unusual' behaviour that triggers alerts [to the]authorities."

The app was obtained and analysed by HRW in partnership with Cure53, a Berlin-based security firm.

As well as its Xinjiang operations, China has 170 million CCTV cameras in place across the country and by the end of 2020, an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed.

All this is part of China's aim to build what it calls "the world's biggest camera surveillance network".

China's also setting up a "social credit" system that is meant to keep score of the conduct and public interactions of all its citizens.

The aim is that by 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distils it into a single number - ranking each citizen.

China's detention camps

Xinjiang is a semi-autonomous region and in theory at least, has a degree of self-governance away from Beijing.

The Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, make up around 45% of its population.

HRW's report comes as China faces increasing scrutiny over its treatment of them and other minorities in Xinjiang.

Up to one million Uighurs are being held in detention camps across Xinjiang, a UN human rights committee heard last year.

One member said she was concerned by reports that Beijing had "turned the Uighur autonomous region into something that resembles a massive internment camp".

A BBC investigation last year revealed that what appear to be "large prison-type structures" have been built across Xinjiang in the past few years.

China says these buildings are "vocational training centres" used to educate and integrate Muslim Uighurs and steer them away from separatism and extremism.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said, "everyone can see that people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang live and work in peace and contentment and enjoy peaceful and progressing lives".

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Xinjiang police 'monitor citizens by app'

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Chinese police are using a mobile app to keep data on millions of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). In a report released on Thursday, HRW said it had reverse engineered the app to see how mass surveillance worked.

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Even in a country known for its extreme spying on its entire population, the degree of surveillance targeting Muslims in particular is unnerving. An estimated 22 to 25 million Muslims live in China, out of a total population of 1.4 billion. Last year, a Freedom House study found that extensive surveillance affects many religious groups, with Muslims as well as Protestant Christians and Tibetan Buddhists experiencing an increase in persecution over the previous five years. In an interview this week, Timothy Grose, a China expert at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, told me, "Right now, we see a lot of the repression being directed against Muslims."
Chinese tech isn't the enemy
The Dove program's bird-like drones have been flown over five provinces so far, and it's perhaps no coincidence that they've been used extensively in one area in particular: Xinjiang, a northwestern region heavily populated by Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority. The government has long considered the region a breeding ground for separatism and extremism. Ethnic riots there killed hundreds in 2009, and some Uighurs have perpetrated terror attacks in recent years. The area is now subject to a heightened level of surveillance, with authorities collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, voice samples, and blood types from residents.

"They're applying a very, very broad attempted solution to what they see as an ideological danger. In Xinjiang, the definition of extremism has expanded so far as to incorporate virtually anything you do as a Muslim," James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, told me. The amount of surveillance directed at that region's 11 million Uighurs, he added, is "certainly disproportionate" relative to that directed at other groups. "Islam is now effectively being demonized in China."

This month, 11,500 Chinese Muslims are heading to Mecca on the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Before leaving the country, some of the pilgrims were given state-issued tracking devices, in the form of "smart cards" attached to lanyards around their necks. The devices bear GPS trackers and customized personal data. The state-run China Islamic Association says they're intended to ensure the pilgrims' safety. (There is legitimate reason for such concerns: During the 2015 Hajj, a stampede killed more than 750 pilgrims.) But some human-rights experts say this is one more effort to surveil Muslims. The government's fear, according to a Human Rights Watch report, is that religious pilgrimages could act as "potential cover for subversive political activity."

"I don't use what comes out of human-rights organizations uncritically, but here's one case where I would definitely side with them," Grose said. "The pilgrims are always accompanied by an official guide, essentially a monitor, who represents the Chinese Islamic Association, which represents the state. Their movements are always under supervision. Their schedules are airtight, with very little room for any extracurricular activities. So the use of GPS in an already tightly put-together schedule just seems too redundant [if it's about safety]. To me, it's about: 'Well, what if one of them sneaks away, and we need to find out where he is and if he's talking to someone and bringing back with him an interpretation of Islam that doesn't accord with [what the government] has been promoting?'"

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China Is Going to Outrageous Lengths to Surveil Its Own Citizens

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Even in a country known for its extreme spying on its entire population, the degree of surveillance targeting Muslims in particular is unnerving. An estimated 22 to 25 million Muslims live in China, out of a total population of 1.4 billion.

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The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there "to prevent escapes." Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave.

"Manner education" is mandatory, but "vocational skills improvement" is offered only after a year in the camps.

Voluntary job training is the reason the Chinese government has given for detaining more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims. But a classified blueprint leaked to a consortium of news organizations shows the camps are instead precisely what former detainees have described: Forced ideological and behavioral re-education centers run in secret.

The classified documents lay out the Chinese government's deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic minorities even before they commit a crime, to rewire their thoughts and the language they speak.

The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.

Taken as a whole, the documents give the most significant description yet of high-tech mass detention in the 21st century in the words of the Chinese government itself. Experts say they spell out a vast system that targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them -- especially Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic minority of more than 10 million people with their own language and culture.

"They confirm that this is a form of cultural genocide," said Adrian Zenz, a leading security expert on the far western region of Xinjiang, the Uighur homeland. "It really shows that from the onset, the Chinese government had a plan."

Zenz said the documents echo the aim of the camps as outlined in a 2017 report from a local branch of the Xinjiang Ministry of Justice: To "wash brains, cleanse hearts, support the right, remove the wrong."

China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where the Uighurs have long resented Beijing's heavy-handed rule. After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Chinese officials began justifying harsh security measures and religious restrictions as necessary to fend off terrorism, arguing that young Uighurs were susceptible to the influence of Islamic extremism. Hundreds have died since in terror attacks, reprisals and race riots, both Uighurs and Han Chinese.

In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched what he called a "People's War on Terror" when bombs set off by Uighur militants tore through a train station in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, just hours after he concluded his first state visit there.

"Build steel walls and iron fortresses. Set up nets above and snares below," state media cited Xi as saying. "Cracking down severely on violent terrorist activities must be the focus of our current struggle."

In 2016, the crackdown intensified dramatically after Xi named Chen Quanguo, a hardline official transferred from Tibet, as Xinjiang's new head. Most of the documents were issued in 2017, as Xinjiang's "War on Terror" morphed into an extraordinary mass detention campaign using military-style technology.

The practices largely continue today. The Chinese government says they work.

"Since the measures have been taken, there's no single terrorist incident in the past three years," said a written response from the Chinese Embassy in the United Kingdom. "Xinjiang is much safer....The so-called leaked documents are fabrication and fake news."

The statement said that religious freedom and the personal freedom of detainees was "fully respected" in Xinjiang.

The documents were given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists by an anonymous source. The ICIJ verified them by examining state media reports and public notices from the time, consulting experts, cross-checking signatures and confirming the contents with former camp employees and detainees.

They consist of a notice with guidelines for the camps, four bulletins on how to use technology to target people, and a court case sentencing a Uighur Communist Party member to 10 years in prison for telling colleagues not to say dirty words, watch porn or eat without praying.

The documents were issued to rank-and-file officials by the powerful Xinjiang Communist Party Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the region's top authority overseeing police, courts and state security. They were put out under the head official at the time, Zhu Hailun, who annotated and signed some personally.

The documents confirm from the government itself what is known about the camps from the testimony of dozens of Uighurs and Kazakhs, satellite imagery and tightly monitored visits by journalists to the region.

Erzhan Qurban, an ethnic Kazakh who moved back to Kazakhstan, was grabbed by police on a trip back to China to see his mother and accused of committing crimes abroad. He protested that he was a simple herder who had done nothing wrong. But for the authorities, his time in Kazakhstan was reason enough for detention.

Qurban told the AP he was locked in a cell with 10 others last year and told not to engage in "religious activities" like praying. They were forced to sit on plastic stools in rigid postures for hours at a time. Talk was forbidden, and two guards kept watch 24 hours a day. Inspectors checked that nails were short and faces trimmed of mustaches and beards, traditionally worn by pious Muslims.

Those who disobeyed were forced to squat or spend 24 hours in solitary confinement in a frigid room.

"It wasn't education, it was just punishment," said Qurban, who was held for nine months. "I was treated like an animal."

Who gets rounded up, and how

On February 18, 2017, Zhu, the Han Chinese official who signed the documents, stood in chilly winter weather atop the front steps of the capital's city hall, overlooking thousands of police in black brandishing rifles.

"With the powerful fist of the People's Democratic Dictatorship, all separatist activities and all terrorists shall be smashed to pieces," Zhu announced into a microphone.

With that began a new chapter in the state's crackdown. Police called Uighurs and knocked on their doors at night to take them in for questioning. Others were stopped at borders or arrested at airports.

In the years since, as Uighurs and Kazakhs were sent to the camps in droves, the government built hundreds of schools and orphanages to house and re-educate their children. Many of those who fled into exile don't even know where their children or loved ones are.

The documents make clear that many of those detained have not actually done anything. One document explicitly states that the purpose of the pervasive digital surveillance is "to prevent problems before they happen" -- in other words, to calculate who might rebel and detain them before they have a chance.

This is done through a system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform or IJOP, designed to screen entire populations. Built by a state-owned military contractor, the IJOP began as an intelligence-sharing tool developed after Chinese military theorists studied the U.S. army's use of information technology in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There's no other place in the world where a computer can send you to an internment camp," said Rian Thum, a Xinjiang expert at the University of Nottingham. "This is absolutely unprecedented."

The IJOP spat out the names of people considered suspicious, such as thousands of "unauthorized" imams not registered with the Chinese government, along with their associates. Suspicious or extremist behavior was so broadly defined that it included going abroad, asking others to pray or using cell phone apps that cannot be monitored by the government.

The IJOP zoomed in on users of "Kuai Ya," a mobile application similar to the iPhone's Airdrop, which had become popular in Xinjiang because it allows people to exchange videos and messages privately. One bulletin showed that officials identified more than 40,000 "Kuai Ya" users for investigation and potential detention; of those, 32 were listed as belonging to "terrorist organizations."

"They're scared people will spread religion through 'Kuai Ya,'" said a man detained after police accused him of using the app. He spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to protect himself and his family. "They can't regulate it....So they want to arrest everyone who's used 'Kuai Ya' before."

The system also targeted people who obtained foreign passports or visas, reflecting the government's fear of Islamic extremist influences from abroad and deep discomfort with any connection between the Uighurs and the outside world. Officials were asked to verify the identities even of people outside the country, showing how China is casting its dragnet for Uighurs far beyond Xinjiang.

In recent years, Beijing has put pressure on countries to which Uighurs have fled, such as Thailand and Afghanistan, to send them back to China. In other countries, state security has also contacted Uighurs and pushed them to spy on each other. For example, a restaurateur now in Turkey, Qurbanjan Nurmemet, said police contacted him with videos of his son strapped to a chair and asked him for information on other Uighurs in Turkey.

Despite the Chinese government's insistence that the camps are vocational training centers for the poor and uneducated, the documents show that those rounded up included party officials and university students.

After the names were collected, lists of targeted people were passed to prefecture governments, who forwarded them to district heads, then local police stations, neighbor watchmen, and Communist Party cadres living with Uighur families.

Some former detainees recalled being summoned by officers and told their names were listed for detention. From there, people were funneled into different parts of the system, from house arrest to detention centers with three levels of monitoring to, at its most extreme, prison.

Experts say the detentions are a clear violation of China's own laws and constitution. Margaret Lewis, a professor of Chinese law at Seton Hall University, said the Communist Party is circumventing the Chinese legal system in Xinjiang.

"Once you're stamped as an enemy, the gloves go off," she said. "They're not even trying to justify this legally....This is arbitrary."

The detention campaign is sweeping. A bulletin notes that in a single week in June 2017, the IJOP identified 24,612 "suspicious persons" in southern Xinjiang, with 15,683 sent to "education and training," 706 to prison and 2,096 to house arrest. It is unknown how typical this week might be. Local officials claim far less than a million are in "training," but researchers estimate up to 1.8 million have been detained at one point or another.

The bulletins stress that relationships must be scrutinized closely, with those interrogated pushed to report the names of friends and relatives. Mamattursun Omar, a Uighur chef arrested after working in Egypt, was interrogated in four detention facilities over nine months in 2017. Omar told the AP that police asked him to verify the identities of other Uighurs in Egypt.

Eventually, Omar says, they began torturing him to make him confess that Uighur students had gone to Egypt to take part in jihad. They strapped him to a contraption called a "tiger chair," shocked him with electric batons, beat him with pipes and whipped him with computer cords.

"I couldn't take it anymore," Omar said. "I just told them what they wanted me to say."

Omar gave the names of six others who worked at a restaurant with him in Egypt. All were sent to prison.

What happens inside the camps

The documents also detail what happens after someone is sent to an "education and training center."

Publicly, in a recent white paper, China's State Council said "the personal freedom of trainees at the education and training centers is protected in accordance with the law." But internally, the documents describe facilities with police stations at the front gates, high guard towers, one-button alarms and video surveillance with no blind spots.

Detainees are only allowed to leave if absolutely necessary, for example because of illness, and even so must have somebody "specially accompany, monitor and control" them. Bath time and toilet breaks are strictly managed and controlled "to prevent escapes." And cell phones are strictly forbidden to stop "collusion between inside and outside."

"Escape was impossible," said Kazakh kingergarten administrator Sayragul Sauytbay, a Communist Party member who was abducted by police in October 2017 and forced to become a Mandarin camp instructor. "In every corner in every place there were armed police."

Sauytbay called the detention center a "concentration camp...much more horrifying than prison," with rape, brainwashing and torture in a "black room" were people screamed. She and another former prisoner, Zumrat Dawut, also told the ICIJ detainees were given medication that made them listless and obedient, and every move was surveilled.

AP journalists who visited Xinjiang in December 2018 saw patrol towers and high walls lined with green barbed wire fencing around camps. One camp in Artux, just north of Kashgar, sat in the middle of a vast, empty, rocky field, and appeared to include a police station at the entrance, workshops, a hospital and dormitories, one with a sign reading "House of Workers" in Chinese.

Recent satellite imagery shows that guard towers and fencing have been removed from some facilities, suggesting the region may have been softening restrictions in response to global criticism. Shohrat Zakir, the governor of Xinjiang, said in March that those detained can now request time and go home on weekends, a claim the AP could not independently verify.

The first item listed as part of the curriculum is ideological education, a bold attempt to change how detainees think and act. It is partly rooted in the ancient Chinese belief in transformation through education -- taken before to terrifying extremes during the mass thought reform campaigns of Mao Zedong.

"It's the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, except now it's powered by high-tech," said Zenz, the researcher.

By showing students the error of their former ways, the centers are supposed to promote "repentance and confession," the directive said. For example, Qurban, the Kazakh herder, was handcuffed, brought to an interview with a Han Chinese leader and forced to acknowledge that he regretted visiting abroad.

The indoctrination goes along with what is called "manner education," where behavior is dictated down to ensuring "timely haircuts and shaves," "regular change of clothes" and "bathing once or twice a week." The tone, experts say, echoes a general perception by the Han Chinese government that Uighurs are prone to violence and need to be civilized -- in much the same way white colonialists treated indigenous people in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

"It's a similar kind of savior mentality -- that these poor Uighurs didn't understand that they were being led astray by extremists," said Darren Byler, a scholar of Uighur culture at the University of Washington. "The way they think about Uighurs in general is that they are backward, that they're not educated....these people are unhygienic and need to be taught how to clean themselves."

Students are to be allowed a phone conversation with relatives at least once a week, and can meet them via video at least once a month, the documents say. Trainers are told to pay attention to "the ideological problems and emotional changes that arise after family communications."

Mandarin is mandated. Beijing has said "the customs of all ethnic groups and the right to use their spoken and written languages are fully protected at the centers." But the documents show that in practice, lessons are taught in Mandarin, and it is the language to be used in daily communication.

A former staffer at Xinjiang TV now in Europe was also selected to become a Mandarin teacher during his month-long detention in 2017. Twice a day, detainees were lined up and inspected by police, and a few were questioned in Mandarin at random, he told the AP. Those who couldn't respond in Mandarin were beaten or deprived of food for days. Otherwise, speaking was forbidden.

One day, the former teacher recalled, an officer asked an old farmer in Mandarin whether he liked the detention center. The man apologized in broken Mandarin and Uighur, saying it was hard for him to understand because of his age. The officer strode over and struck the old man's head with a baton. He crumpled to the ground, bleeding.

"They didn't see us as humans," said the former teacher, who declined to provide his name out of fear of retribution against his family. "They treated us like animals -- like pigs, cows, sheep."

Detainees are tested on Mandarin, ideology and discipline, with "one small test per week, one medium test per month, and one big test per season," the documents state. These test scores feed into an elaborate point system.

Detainees who do well are to be rewarded with perks like family visits, and may be allowed to "graduate" and leave. Detainees who do poorly are to be sent to a stricter "management area" with longer detention times. Former detainees told the AP that punishments included food deprivation, handcuffing, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.

Detainees' scores are entered in the IJOP. Students are sent to separate facilities for "intensive skills training" only after at least one year of learning ideology, law and Mandarin.

After they leave, the documents stipulate, every effort should be made to get them jobs. Some detainees describe being forced to sign job contracts, working long hours for low pay and barred from leaving factory grounds during weekdays.

Qurban, the Kazakh herder, said after nine months in the camp, a supervisor came to tell him he was "forgiven" but must never tell what he had seen. After he returned to his village, officials told him he had to work in a factory.

"If you don't go, we'll send you back to the center," an official said.

Qurban went to a garment factory, which he wasn't allowed to leave. After 53 days stitching clothes, he was released. After another month under house arrest, he finally was allowed to return to Kazakhstan and see his children. He received his salary in cash: 300 Chinese yuan, or just under $42.

Long an ordinary herder who thought little of politics, Qurban used to count many Han Chinese among his friends. Now, he said, he's begun to hate them.

"I've never committed a crime, I've never done anything wrong," he said. "It was beyond comprehension why they put me there."

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Leaked Chinese documents show how mass surveillance system flags Uighurs for detention camps

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The watch towers, double-locked doors and video surveillance in the Chinese camps are there "to prevent escapes." Uighurs and other minorities held inside are scored on how well they speak the dominant Mandarin language and follow strict rules on everything down to bathing and using the toilet, scores that determine if they can leave.

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Chinese police are using a mobile app to store data on 13 million ethnic minority Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has revealed.

The app, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, is being used to store information from the height and weight of individuals to facial recognition scans.

The report, released on Thursday, added that Xinjiang authorities closely watch 36 categories of behaviour, including those who do not socialise with neighbours, often avoid using the front door, don't use a smartphone, donate to mosques "enthusiastically", and use an "abnormal" amount of electricity.

"The goal is apparently to identify patterns of, and predict, the everyday life and resistance of its population, and, ultimately, to engineer and control reality," HRW said in the report.

The rights watchdog worked with German security firm Cure53 to reverse engineer the app in late 2018 to provide "an unprecedented window into how mass surveillance actually works in Xinjiang".

Along with collecting personal information, the app prompts officials to file reports about people, vehicles and events they find suspect, and sends out "investigative missions" for police to follow up.

Officers are also asked to check whether suspects use any of the 51 internet tools that are deemed suspicious, including messaging platforms popular outside China like WhatsApp, LINE and Telegram.

A number of people said they or their family members have been detained for having WhatsApp or a Virtual Private Network (VPN) installed on their phones during checks by authorities, according to the report.

China has led an increasingly repressive campaign in Xinjiang following a series of knife attacks and ethnic riots over the past 10 years.

It has come under international criticism over its policies in the northwest region where as many as one million Uighurs and other minorities, mostly Muslim, are being held in internment camps, according to a group of experts cited by the United Nations.

China claims the camps are vocational training centres.

Many are also forced to host government monitors in their own homes and undergo other forms of regular surveillance.

HRW said Beijing has already collected "DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans and blood types of all residents between the age of 12 and 65" as well as voice samples.

"Psychologically, the more people are sure that their actions are monitored and that they, at anytime, can be judged for moving outside of a safe grey-space, the more likely they are to do everything to avoid coming close to crossing a moving red line," Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre, told AFP news agency.

"There is no rule of law in China, the party ultimately decides what is legal and illegal behaviour, and it doesn't have to be written down."

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HRW: China using mobile app for surveillance of Uighurs

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Chinese police are using a mobile app to store data on 13 million ethnic minority Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang province, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has revealed. The app, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, is being used to store information from the height and weight of individuals to facial recognition scans.

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The woman remembers the first time she got a smartphone.

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. At first, she didn't believe them.

In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula's home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. Atawula's children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.

The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula's husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in Xinjiang and waited for the children's passports.

"The day I left, my husband was arrested," Atawula said. When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working-and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.

She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in Xinjiang was over. Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. "Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life-ever since I was born," she said.

Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. It's home to Turkey's largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to Xinjiang, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China's ancient Silk Road trade route.

Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. She is unable to contact any of her relatives-via phone, WeChat, or any other app. "I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families," she says. "I think, why can't we even hear the voice of our children?"

For Uyghurs in Xinjiang, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. And many wouldn't dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. It's just one of the ways President Xi Jinping's government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.

Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city's winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. The Uyghur separatist flag-a light blue version of the Turkish flag-is a common sight. It's a banned image in China, representing East Turkestan, the name for Xinjiang despised by the Chinese government that almost all Uyghurs here give to their homeland.

Xinjiang-meaning "new frontier" in Chinese-was brought under the Communist Party of China's control in 1949. During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party's agenda. The government tried to stamp out separatism and "assimilate" the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China's dominant ethnic group, to Xinjiang.

During the '90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as "inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts" perpetrated by separatist groups. Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, Xinjiang, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. "I have never seen such viciousness in my life," she said. "Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators."

After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush's war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in Xinjiang. In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital. Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population-digitally.

In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat-known as "Undidar" in the Uyghur language. It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.

The launch of WeChat was "a moment of huge relief and freedom," said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London's SOAS University. "Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way," Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.

By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, "most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional." Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. Most Uyghurs, he said, "didn't understand the authorities were watching."

This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out "malpractice" on instant messaging apps, in particular "rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography." WeChat, alongside its rival apps, was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.

Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master's student in Istanbul who left Xinjiang in 2014, just before the crackdown. During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.

Mijit's brother, who was drafted into the Xinjiang police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. "He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words," Mijit said. She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to Xinjiang for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born

The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across Xinjiang. "All your life will be in the record," he told her.

In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider "Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism." It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.

After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave Xinjiang for Turkey. When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. "I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one," she said. She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.

Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database."It was like a monkey show," she said. "They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare."

Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of Xinjiang's Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. "The police station was full of Uyghurs," Abduwayit says. "All of them were there to give blood samples."

Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. "They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice."

The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China's speech recognition industry. In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in Xinjiang province. The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working "under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security" to provide "a new experience for public safety and forensic identification," according to the Chinese version of its website. The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.

Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. "Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company's innovative work," iFlytek's website reads.

Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. "You feel like you are under water," he says. "You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you're careful."

He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. "My friend said, 'Tell me what's happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?' We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night."

To transform Xinjiang into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.

In the year following Chen Quanguo's 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent- a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It's part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. Around 173 million cameras now watch China's citizens. In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of "key public areas."

For Uyghurs, "the employment situation in Xinjiang is difficult and limited," said Zenz. A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese-which many Uyghurs don't have. Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

The government's efforts to control the people of Xinjiang were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said it believed one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a "massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy."

At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched "a vocational education and training program" and passed a law legitimizing what they termed "training centers."

In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in Xinjiang to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing's commitment to "transforming Xinjiang in its own image."

Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. She now lives in Istanbul. According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained "for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region." Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.

Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the Xinjiang capital. Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.

Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp-a blocked app in China-storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.

She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. "The leaders in Beijing can see you," the guards told her. Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping's speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. "If you wrote something bad, they would punish you," Jalilova said. "You could only say 'Thank you to the Party' and 'I have cleansed myself of this or that' and 'I will be a different person once I am released.'"

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to Xinjiang.

Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run Xinjiang Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities' testimonials for their missing relatives. It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.

It follows that the majority of people who have escaped Xinjiang for Turkey in recent years are women. Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.

Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from Xinjiang by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.

The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as "the widows." Their husbands are trapped in Xinjiang, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.

Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left Xinjiang in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. She left her other children and husband in Xinjiang. She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China's two-child policy allows.

When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016-as that was the last time she spoke to him. She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. "I am so afraid my children hate me," she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs' plight. Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.

Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in Xinjiang as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)

On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. "It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons," Aksoy's statement read.

Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry, rebuffed these claims two days later, calling the statement "a groundless accusation based on lies." She highlighted the threat of "three evil forces"-terrorism, extremism and separatism-in China and abroad.

As a result of China's policy in the region, Hua said, Xinjiang residents "now have a stronger sense of security, happiness, and fulfillment... the radiant smile on the faces of local people is the most eloquent response to those rumours."

Hua also underlined the terrorist threat Turkey faces as a multi-ethnic country. "If it adopts double standards on counter-terrorism, it will only end up hurting itself as well as others," she said.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. "Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance," she said. Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.

Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as "2009 Urumqi riots," "2012 Kashgar riots," and anything to do with Islam.

In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in Xinjiang became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. "When we spoke, they'd keep it brief. They'd say, 'We're OK, safe.' They'd speak in code-if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they'd been 'admitted to hospital.' I'd say 'understood.' We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote 'I am helpless' on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, 'Assalam,' before deleting me."

A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. A sun emoji-"I am alive." A flower-"I have been released."

Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write "inshallah" on social media, they now write "CPC."

On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said "it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them." A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party's symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, "like the seeds of a pomegranate." By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve

In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled Xinjiang after police took her DNA. They're filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a "digital prison."

Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.

Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey-and thousands across the world-who have decided to upload their story to the internet.

Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. "I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur," he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. "Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos," Harri said.

Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Ayup described how at the beginning, people would "cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized," but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.

Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run Xinjiang Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in Xinjiang.

Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. "There's evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies," Bunin said.

He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. "It's a strong sign the Xinjiang authorities are reacting to these videos," he said.

China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in Xinjiang, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. That followed a statement by Xinjiang governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact "boarding schools."

Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.

Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.

On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun-the woman who left five of her children in Xinjiang-was sitting in the ladies' clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in Xinjiang.

She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. An off-camera voice shouts " Bizi! Bizi! Bizi! "-Chinese for "Nose! Nose! Nose!" and an excited group of children tap their noses. Tursun was astonished.

On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. "Her emotion, her laugh ... it's her. It's like a miracle," she said. "I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life." It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter's voice.

The video appears to come from one of the so-called "Little Angel Schools" in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun's native Kashgar, where it's been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to "provide security."

Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents' village in Xinjiang. She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. The woman agreed. Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.

"When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages," Atawula said. She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.

A month later, she got a reply. The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.

Atawula sent a reply with her go-between-but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. Atawula doesn't know what happened to her. She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.

It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother's letter. She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister, How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn't contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you... maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don't worry about the children.
This article is a co-production with Coda's Authoritarian Tech channel.

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Inside China's Massive Surveillance Operation

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In Xinjiang, northwest China, the government is cracking down on the minority Muslim Uyghur population, keeping them under constant surveillance and throwing more than a million people into concentration camps. But in Istanbul, 3,000 miles away, a community of women who have escaped a life of repression are fighting a digital resistance.

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President Xi Jinping of China looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the Xinjiang region. As many as one million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held in internment camps in Xinjiang. Credit Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

KASHGAR, China - A God's-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.

To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.

The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of Xinjiang, the troubled region where Kashgar is located.

This is the vision of high-tech surveillance - precise, all-seeing, infallible - that China's leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making Xinjiang an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that could spread across the country and beyond.

It is also a vision that some of President Trump's aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. Beyond concerns about market barriers, theft and national security, they argue that China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad - and that the United States must stop it.

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corporation, a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang.

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to "apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security," Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog post. "Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time."

The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.

On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: "If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information."

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Pictures from presentations by the China Electronics Technology Corporation at recent industry shows. Credit Paul Mozur/The New York Times

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring Xinjiang for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of Xinjiang's population.

It is a virtual cage that complements the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang where the authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.

The Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the Xinjiang effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across Xinjiang, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and detention camps. C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of the company through subsidiaries.

"Xinjiang is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China's mass surveillance systems," said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. "These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose - to target Muslims."

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall. Credit Paul Mozur/The New York Times

In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 - about 85 percent of them Uighur - the C.E.T.C. platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people's movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.

By comparison, the F.B.I.'s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.

The police in Xinjiang use a mobile app, made by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.

Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an "unusual" amount of electricity.

The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else's car.

The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual "fences" across Xinjiang. If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.

"The government's arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app," Ms. Wang said, adding that the system "is programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness."

Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in Xinjiang as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.

The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang are job training centers. Hikvision has denied "any inappropriate actions in Xinjiang," and C.E.T.C. declined to comment when reached by phone.

C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China's first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government's internal security requirements.

In recent years, it turned to Xinjiang.

The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.

The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in Xinjiang totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the indoctrination camps.

Hikvision has received contracts in Xinjiang worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. Another company tapping into Xinjiang's security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. It signed an agreement last year with the region's police department to help officers analyze data.

A checkpoint in Hotan last year. Credit Andy Wong/Associated Press

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across Xinjiang in buildings that look like toll plazas.

Instead of coins, they collect personal information.

On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their identity cards.

"Head up," the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.

There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.

Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.

Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. At many checkpoints, privileged groups - Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors - are waved through "green channels." In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets - and in the online police databases - one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.

"The goal here is instilling fear - fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life," said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about Xinjiang as well as China's surveillance state. "The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect."

A database stored online by SenseNets, a Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of surveillance in Xinjiang: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of about 3.5 million.

"This can be pulled off by anyone, and that's the part that worries me," said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.

According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000 checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.

The authorities in Xinjiang also sometimes force residents to install an app known as "Clean Net Guard" on their phones to monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.

Kashgar and other areas of Xinjiang have in recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from residents too, especially Muslims. Officials now collect blood, fingerprints, voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises, which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.

These databases are not yet completely integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the Xinjiang surveillance state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers, officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.

"We risk understating the extent to which this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower," said Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in Xinjiang. "It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century police state so powerful."

Security gates at the entrance to a Kashgar mosque in 2016. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Xinjiang's security and surveillance systems are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. Delegations of police officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities to admire - and consider adopting - the measures.

They often visit police command centers where rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.

"The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in Xinjiang," Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to Xinjiang last year, according to an official report on the website of the city's police bureau.

Xinjiang's high-tech policing, he added, was "something we should vigorously study."

Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces on China's southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance system used in Xinjiang, "laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout," the company said last year.

C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced "command center information system" similar to the one in Xinjiang.

The technology has some way to go. Dust and bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle to track large numbers of people simultaneously. Even the best systems can be accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.

A technician who until recently installed and maintained computers for the authorities in Xinjiang said police surveillance centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and inefficient undertaking.

And outside urban centers, police officers often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for speaking to a journalist.

The spending spree on security in Xinjiang has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.

In Kashgar, for example, the county of Yengisar warned this year of a "huge shortfall" from spending on security and said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in previously undeclared "invisible debt."

"The pressure from ensuring basic spending for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary," it said.

Still, the region's leaders told officials this year that they must not wind back spending.

"Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task that takes priority over everything else," the leadership said in the region's annual budget report. "Use every possible means to find funds so that the high-pressure offensive does not let up."

Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Aaron Krolik from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: China Imposes A Spying State In Its Far West. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How China Uses High-Tech Surveillance to Subdue Minorities

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KASHGAR, China - A God's-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - social media and the Arab spring 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - social media and the Arab spring 

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https://www.wired.com/2016/01/so

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Five years ago this week, massive protests toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, marking the height of the Arab Spring. Empowered by access to social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, protesters organized across the Middle East, starting in December 2010 in Tunisia, and gathered together to speak out against oppression, inspiring hope for a better, more democratic future. Commentators, comparing these activists to the US peace protesters of 1968, praised the effort as a democratic dawn for an area that had long been populated by autocracies. In a photo collection published by The New York Times a few months later, Irish writer Colum McCann wrote: "The light from the Arab Spring rose from the ground up; the hope is now that the darkness doesn't fall."

Social media, it turns out, was not a new path to democracy, but merely a tool.

The darkness has fallen. Half a decade later, the Middle East is roiling in violence and repression. Activists are being intimidated into restraint by governments that are, with the exception of Tunisia, more totalitarian than those they replaced, if any government as such really exists at all. Meanwhile, militants have harnessed the same technology to organize attacks and recruit converts, catapulting the world into instability. Instead of new robust democracies, we have a global challenge with no obvious solution. The Arab Spring carried the promise that social media and the Internet were going to unleash a new wave of positive social change. But the past five years have shown that liberty isn't the only end toward which these tools can be turned.

Activists were able to organize and mobilize in 2011 partly because authoritarian governments didn't yet understand very much about how to use social media. They didn't see the potential, says NYU professor of politics Joshua Tucker, a principle investigator at the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at New York University. "There are a lot of reasons the people in power were slow to pick up on this," he adds. "One of the things about not have a free press is it is harder to learn what was going on in the world."

Spreading Misinformation

Today, governments take an aggressive hand in shutting down digital channels people use to organize against them. In Egypt, for example, where 26 million people are on Facebook (up from 4.7 million people in 2011), security forces arrested three people who administered nearly two dozen Facebook pages, according to Egyptian media reports. It also detained activists who had been involved in prior protests. And at the end of December, the government shut down Facebook's Free Basics service, which had offered free Internet services to Egyptians on mobile phones. More than 3 million people had signed up for the program in just two months, according to Facebook. Meanwhile Turkey has made 805 requests for tweets to be removed since 2012, according to Twitter's most recent transparency report; more than half were made last year.

These governments have also become adept at using those same channels to spread misinformation. "You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a pedophile," says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London. "The possibility of creating an alternative narrative is one people didn't consider, and it turns out people in authoritarian regimes are quite good at it."

The tools that catalyzed the Arab Spring, we've learned, are only as good or as bad as those who use them.

Even when activists are able to get their messages out, they have trouble galvanizing people to actually take action. The sentiments that gain the largest audiences often contain religious elements, according to Mansour Al-hadj, who is a director at the Middle East Media Research Institute. "The message by itself without any religious element in it, wouldn't work in the long run," he says. "The activists' accounts on Twitter and Facebook are very active and they have a lot of followers, but they cannot drive masses," he says, because their sentiments are more moderate.

Laced through media coverage of the Arab Spring was what turned out to be the naïve hope that people were inherently, unequivocally good and that unleashing their collective consciousness via social media would naturally result in good things happening. But it turns out that consciousness was not so collective after all. The tools that catalyzed the Arab Spring, we've learned, are only as good or as bad as those who use them. And as it turns out, bad people are also very good at social media. Militant groups like the Islamic State have been reported to recruit converts using Facebook and Twitter and use encrypted communications technology to coordinate attacks.

To be sure, the Arab Spring protests-and the subsequent political protests from Occupy Wall Street to Russian demonstrations in 2012-were significant. They introduced a new form of political and social organizing, of " hyper-networked protests, revolts, and riots." But we're just beginning to understand the impact of this new communications technology. Social media, it turns out, was not a new path to democracy, but merely a tool. And for a few brief months, only the young and the idealistic knew how it worked.

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Social Media Made the Arab Spring, But Couldn't Save It

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Five years ago this week, massive protests toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, marking the height of the Arab Spring. Empowered by access to social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, protesters organized across the Middle East, starting in December 2010 in Tunisia, and gathered together to speak out against oppression, inspiring hope for a better, more democratic future.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - social movements in the internet age 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - social movements in the internet age 

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London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

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Social Movements in the Age of the Internet

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Qiu Rui, a policeman in Chongqing, was on duty this summer when he received an alert from a facial recognition system at a local square. There was a high probability a man caught on camera was a suspect in a 2002 murder case, the system told him.

The depth, breadth and intrusiveness of China's mass surveillance may be unprecedented in modern history

The city's surveillance system scans facial features of people on the streets from frames of video footage in real time, creating a virtual map of the face. It can then match this information against scanned faces of suspects in a police database. If there is a match that passes a preset threshold, typically 60% or higher, the system immediately notifies officers. Three days later the police captured the man, who eventually admitted that he was the suspect.

Cases such as this, where facial recognition systems are used to help local police crack crime cases, are not unusual in the south-west China city, which recently ranked first in an analysis of the world's most surveilled cities compiled by the UK-based technology research firm Comparitech. With 2.58m cameras covering 15.35 million people - equal to one camera for every six residents - Chongqing has more surveillance cameras than any other city in the world for its population, beating even Beijing, Shanghai and tech hub Shenzhen.

Eight of the 10 most surveilled cities in the analysis are in China. London ranked sixth with 627,707 cameras covering 9 million residents and Atlanta, Georgia, came 10th with 7,800 cameras for 501,178 people.

10 cities with most surveillance cameras per person
10 cities with most surveillance cameras per person

Chongqing, China's most densely populated city, has been part of the Xue Liang (Sharp Eyes) pilot scheme to tackle crime, which ranks the trustworthiness of citizens and penalises or credits them accordingly. Many crimes committed in a certain area of Chongqing were committed by non-residents, so facial recognition cameras were seen as a way to combat this. According to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, China is anticipated to have 626m CCTV cameras in use by next year.

But critics warn such widespread surveillance violates internationally guaranteed rights to privacy. To meet international privacy standards enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both collection and use of biometric data should be limited to people found to be involved in wrongdoing, and not broad populations who have no specific link to crime. Individuals should have the right to know what biometric data the government holds on them. China's automated facial recognition systems violate those standards.

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A 3D rendering security camera in an airport. Photograph: PhonlamaiPhoto/Getty Images/iStockphoto

"What we're seeing is a race to the bottom of privacy among police bureaus in China, with each claiming to be the best and most innovative in carrying out mass surveillance and social control," says Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"These systems are being developed and implemented without meaningful privacy protections against state surveillance. The depth, breadth and intrusiveness of the Chinese government's mass surveillance on its citizens may be unprecedented in modern history."

Cities elsewhere may not be too far behind China's mass surveillance. Over the summer, Transport for London used its more than 260 wifi-enabled stations to collect the unique media access control address of users' smartphone devices, a request sent when a device is searching for a wifi connection, to track their travel journeys precisely. It was only after the media raised awareness of the project that TfL widely informed its passengers.

A few weeks later, it emerged that the private operator of the King's Cross development in London had deployed facial recognition technology in its CCTV network without express consent or warnings to the public. After public outcry and an investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office, the programme was scrapped.

"We've almost got as many CCTV cameras as China, not quite, but heading that way," says Paul Wiles, the UK's biometrics commissioner. "With the rise of things like facial recognition, that is why we need new legislation that decides what is in the public's interest and the legal structure within which they can be used. We shouldn't drift there by accident."

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A Chinese flag flies near a security camera monitoring a traffic intersection in Beijing. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

In May, San Francisco became the first major US city to enforce a ban. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who championed the legislation, said: "This is really about saying: 'We can have security without being a security state. We can have good policing without being a police state.' And part of that is building trust with the community based on good community information, not on Big Brother technology."

Since then, two more Californian cities, Oakland and Berkeley, have also passed bans on all government use of facial recognition technology. Somerville, Massachusetts, passed a similar law this summer.

"I think some cities in the UK may well follow those in the US that have banned facial recognition, or at least call for a temporary halt until we can contemplate legislation," says Wiles. "Personally, I think the problem with banning is that you then don't make that crucial decision of whether any of these uses are in the public interest. I would rather see a proper legislative framework and proper trial."

Some people support facial recognition on the basis that technology has always driven change and is a force for good if used responsibly and proportionately. "The facial recognition technology genie is out of the bottle," says Stuart Greenfield of Facewatch, the UK's leading facial recognition company. "If used responsibly by law enforcement and business to assist in reducing crime it is a positive force for good."

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CCTV sign in King's Cross, London. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

However, others are concerned about the number of surveillance cameras and data collection systems included in "smart city" initiatives. "City authorities and the people they serve need to be far more sceptical about whether actually having more data is a panacea for various issues, as well as what additional risks it creates," says Edin Omanovic, advocacy director at Privacy International.

"The obvious risk is that this only really benefits city authorities and the big tech companies who sell the solutions, rather than the actual people they are purporting to help."

'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state': the rise of facial recognition technology

Omanovic argues that live facial recognition fundamentally threatens free societies. "It might start with the monitoring of just a few thousand people but it definitely won't end there," says Omanovic. "Authorities need to permanently ban its roll out now before it's too late."

There seems to be little sign, though, of cities scaling back surveillance in the near future. "Of all the cities we looked at, the vast majority were increasing their CCTV use or had plans in place to up their surveillance," says Paul Bischoff, editor of Comparitech.

"Singapore has plans to install 100,000 facial-recognition cameras on lampposts, Chicago police have asked for 30,000 more, and Moscow intends to have 174,000 by the end of this year."
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, catch up on our best stories or sign up for our weekly newsletter Topics

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Big Brother is watching: Chinese city with 2.6m cameras is world's most heavily surveilled

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Qiu Rui, a policeman in Chongqing, was on duty this summer when he received an alert from a facial recognition system at a local square. There was a high probability a man caught on camera was a suspect in a 2002 murder case, the system told him.

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China 'world's worst' for invasive use of biometric data

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Study ranks 50 countries on how extensively they use facial recognition and other biological tools as well as privacy protections for individuals.

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China's WeChat is a site for social interaction, a form of currency, a dating app, a tool for sporting teams and deliverer of news: Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. But it is also an ever more powerful weapon of social control for the Chinese government.

I've just been locked out of WeChat (or Weixin 微信 as it is known in Chinese) and, to get back on, have had to pass through some pretty Orwellian steps - steps which have led others to question why I went along with it.

One reason is that life in Beijing would be extremely difficult without WeChat. The other is that I could not have written this piece without experiencing the stages which have now clearly put my image, and even my voice, on some sort of biometric database of troublemakers.

I was in Hong Kong to cover the enormous candlelight vigil marking 30 years since the People's Liberation Army was ordered to open fire on its own people to remove the mostly student protesters who'd been gathering in and around Tiananmen Square for months in June 1989.

This moment in history has been all but erased from public discourse on mainland China but in Hong Kong, with its special status in the Chinese-speaking world, people turn out every year to remember the bloody crackdown.

This time round the crowd was particularly huge, with estimates ranging up to 180,000.

Naturally I took photos of the sea of people holding candles and singing, and posted some of these on my WeChat "moments".

The post contained no words - just photos.

Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was? Why were people gathering? Where was it?

That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China.

I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.

"Your login has been declined due to account exceptions. Try to log in again and proceed as instructed," came the message on the screen.

Then, when I tried to log back in, a new message appeared: "This WeChat account has been suspected of spreading malicious rumours and has been temporarily blocked..."

It seems posting photos of an actual event taking place, without commentary, amounts to "spreading malicious rumours" in China.

I was given time to try and log in again the next day after my penalty had been served.

When I did I had to push "agree and unblock" under the stated reason of "spread malicious rumours".

So this rumour-monger clicked on "agree".

Then came a stage I was not prepared for. "Faceprint is required for security purposes," it said.

I was instructed to hold my phone up - to "face front camera straight on" - looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to "Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese".

My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.

Afterwards a big green tick: "Approved"

Apart from being creepy you can only imagine the potential use of this type of data.

No doubt I have now joined some list of suspicious individuals in the hands of goodness knows which Chinese government agencies.

In China pretty much everyone has WeChat. I don't know a single person without it. Developed by tech giant Tencent it is an incredible app. It's convenient. It works. It's fun. It was ahead of the game on the global stage and it has found its way into all corners of people's existence.

It could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike.

Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.

When I placed details of this entire process on Twitter others were asking: why cave in to such a Big Brother intrusion on your privacy?

They've probably not lived in China.

It is hard to imagine a life here without it.

When you meet somebody in a work context they don't given you a name card any more, they share their WeChat; if you play for a football team training details are on WeChat; children's school arrangements, WeChat; Tinder-style dates, WeChat; movie tickets, WeChat; news stream, WeChat; restaurant locations, WeChat; paying for absolutely everything from a bowl of noodles to clothes to a dining room table... WeChat.

People wouldn't be able to speak to their friends or family without it.

So the censors who can lock you out of Wechat hold real power over you.

The app - thought by Western intelligence agencies to be the least secure of its type in the world - has essentially got you over a barrel.

If you want to have a normal life in China, you had better not say anything controversial about the Communist Party and especially not about its leader, Xi Jinping.

This is China 2019.

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China's WeChat is a site for social interaction, a form of currency, a dating app, a tool for sporting teams and deliverer of news: Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. But it is also an ever more powerful weapon of social control for the Chinese government.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - How Egypt shut down the Internet 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - How Egypt shut down the Internet 

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Organisations that track global internet access detected a collapse in traffic in to and out of Egypt at around 10.30GMT on Thursday night.

The shut down involved the withdrawal of more than 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes by Egyptian ISPs, according to Renesys, a networking firm. Only one ISP out of 10, Noor Data Networks, appeared largely unaffected. It connects to the outside world via an undersea cable operated by Telecom Italia.

Renesys speculated that the apparent anomaly of Noor Data Networks may be a result of the fact it provides services to the Egyptian stock exchange.

BGP routes are one of the most vital parts of the internet. They are mostly used by ISPs so their networks can exchange information about how to best route the packets of data that make up all internet communications.

If an ISP withdraws its BGP routes, its customers effectively disappear from the internet, unable to access websites and services, send and receive email, or use voice services such as Skype.

The Egyptian government's action is unprecedented in the history of the internet. Countries such as China, Iran, Thailand and Tunisia have cut off access to news websites and social networking services during periods of unrest, as Egypt did when it cut off Facebook and Twitter earlier this week.

The ongoing attempt by the Egyptian government to shut down all online communication is, however, a new phenomenon. It not only prevents ordinary Egyptian internet users from accessing any websites, it cripples Tor, an anti-censorship tool that technical experts and activists were using to circumvent the Facebook and Twitter blocks.

The action puts Egypt, temporarily at least, in the company of North Korea, which has never allowed its citizens access to the internet.

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Organisations that track global internet access detected a collapse in traffic in to and out of Egypt at around 10.30GMT on Thursday night. The shut down involved the withdrawal of more than 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes by Egyptian ISPs , according to Renesys, a networking firm.

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Zeynep Tufekci

Credit... Jennifer Heuer

At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an article about his appeal to his voter base and wanted to confirm a few quotations.

Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and "autoplay" videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.

Since I was not in the habit of watching extreme right-wing fare on YouTube, I was curious whether this was an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. So I created another YouTube account and started watching videos of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, letting YouTube's recommender algorithm take me wherever it would.

Before long, I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme than the mainstream political fare I had started with.

Intrigued, I experimented with nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged. Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.

It seems as if you are never "hard core" enough for YouTube's recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

This is not because a cabal of YouTube engineers is plotting to drive the world off a cliff. A more likely explanation has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google's business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes.

What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with - or to incendiary content in general.

Is this suspicion correct? Good data is hard to come by; Google is loath to share information with independent researchers. But we now have the first inklings of confirmation, thanks in part to a former Google engineer named Guillaume Chaslot.

Mr. Chaslot worked on the recommender algorithm while at YouTube. He grew alarmed at the tactics used to increase the time people spent on the site. Google fired him in 2013, citing his job performance. He maintains the real reason was that he pushed too hard for changes in how the company handles such issues.

The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation of YouTube content with the help of Mr. Chaslot. It found that YouTube often "fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources," and that such extremist tendencies were evident with a wide variety of material. If you searched for information on the flu vaccine, you were recommended anti-vaccination conspiracy videos.

It is also possible that YouTube's recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Mr. Chaslot created a program to keep track of YouTube's most recommended videos as well as its patterns of recommendations. He discovered that whether you started with a pro-Clinton or pro-Trump video on YouTube, you were many times more likely to end up with a pro-Trump video recommended.

Combine this finding with other research showing that during the 2016 campaign, fake news, which tends toward the outrageous, included much more pro-Trump than pro-Clinton content, and YouTube's tendency toward the incendiary seems evident.

YouTube has recently come under fire for recommending videos promoting the conspiracy theory that the outspoken survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., are "crisis actors" masquerading as victims. Jonathan Albright, a researcher at Columbia, recently "seeded" a YouTube account with a search for "crisis actor" and found that following the "up next" recommendations led to a network of some 9,000 videos promoting that and related conspiracy theories, including the claim that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax.

What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look "behind the curtain," to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.

Human beings have many natural tendencies that need to be vigilantly monitored in the context of modern life. For example, our craving for fat, salt and sugar, which served us well when food was scarce, can lead us astray in an environment in which fat, salt and sugar are all too plentiful and heavily marketed to us. So too our natural curiosity about the unknown can lead us astray on a website that leads us too much in the direction of lies, hoaxes and misinformation.

In effect, YouTube has created a restaurant that serves us increasingly sugary, fatty foods, loading up our plates as soon as we are finished with the last meal. Over time, our tastes adjust, and we seek even more sugary, fatty foods, which the restaurant dutifully provides. When confronted about this by the health department and concerned citizens, the restaurant managers reply that they are merely serving us what we want.

This situation is especially dangerous given how many people - especially young people - turn to YouTube for information. Google's cheap and sturdy Chromebook laptops, which now make up more than 50 percent of the pre-college laptop education market in the United States, typically come loaded with ready access to YouTube.

This state of affairs is unacceptable but not inevitable. There is no reason to let a company make so much money while potentially helping to radicalize billions of people, reaping the financial benefits while asking society to bear so many of the costs.

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Opinion | YouTube, the Great Radicalizer

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Zeynep Tufekci At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an article about his appeal to his voter base and wanted to confirm a few quotations. Soon I noticed something peculiar.

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It most likely began with a tiny bit of code that implanted malware, which gave attackers access to Mr. Bezos' photos and texts.

Jeff Bezos began a quest to find out who had hacked his iPhone after his private photos and texts appeared in The National Enquirer. Credit... Joshua Roberts/Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO - On the afternoon of May 1, 2018, Jeff Bezos received a message on WhatsApp from an account belonging to Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The two men had previously communicated using the messaging platform, but Mr. Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, had not expected a message that day - let alone one with a video of Saudi and Swedish flags with Arabic text.

The video, a file of more than 4.4 megabytes, was more than it appeared, according to a forensic analysis that Mr. Bezos commissioned and paid for to discover who had hacked his iPhone X. Hidden in that file was a separate bit of code that most likely implanted malware that gave attackers access to Mr. Bezos' entire phone, including his photos and private communications.

Mr. Bezos has been on a singular quest to find out who penetrated the device since early 2019, when he said The National Enquirer's parent company had threatened to release private photographs and texts, and the forensic study was part of that effort. Those pictures and messages showed Mr. Bezos, who was married at the time, with another woman, Lauren Sanchez. The analysis did not connect the hack to The Enquirer.

The forensic report on Mr. Bezos' phone was at the heart of a United Nations statement on Wednesday raising concerns about Prince Mohammed. The analysis essentially accused the Saudi prince of using malware created by a private cybersecurity company to spy on and to intimidate Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. At the time of the hack, Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi writer, was employed at The Post, which has published coverage critical of the Saudi government. Mr. Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in late 2018.

Many technical mysteries remain about the infiltration of Mr. Bezos' phone, including what type of malware was used. The forensic report did not detail whether Mr. Bezos had opened the file that was sent to him via Crown Prince Mohammed's WhatsApp account. Cybersecurity experts said some malware did not require anyone to click on the file for it to install on a phone.

The details of the hack could not be independently verified by The New York Times. Mr. Bezos has been pushing a theory of Saudi involvement with the threats from The Enquirer, without providing proof, since early 2019. The Enquirer's parent company has said Ms. Sanchez's brother, Michael, was the sole source of the texts and intimate photos it acquired.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington has said that accusations that the kingdom was involved in hacking Mr. Bezos' phone were " absurd. "

The report's conclusions renew questions about the shadowy world of private hackers for hire. For the right client, or the right sum, such hackers apparently infiltrated the phone of one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men. The report did not say which private cybersecurity company was used, but suggested that the Tel Aviv-based NSO Group and Milan-based Hacking Team had the capabilities for such an attack.

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Some of the texts that Mr. Bezos exchanged with Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, on WhatsApp. Credit... via FTI

The hack also exposed how popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp have vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. In October, WhatsApp sued the NSO Group in federal court, claiming that NSO's spy technology was used on its service to target journalists and human rights activists. WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has patched the flaw that the malware used.

"This case really highlights the threats that are posed by a lawless and unaccountable private surveillance industry," said David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur who was a co-author of Wednesday's statement. "The companies who are creating these tools are extremely crafty and aggressive, and it's a cat-and-mouse game at this point."

NSO said it was not involved in any hack of Mr. Bezos' phone. Hacking Team did not respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp declined to comment, as did FTI Consulting, the company that Mr. Bezos' security team hired to examine his phone and that wrote the forensic analysis. Amazon declined to comment on behalf of Mr. Bezos.

Malware that was created for the explicit purpose of prying into private online communications, also known as spyware, has become a $1 billion industry. While companies like the NSO Group and Hacking Team have been accused of deploying their spyware with governments to monitor dissidents and others, smaller companies also sell simpler versions of the software for as little as $10, allowing people to snoop on their spouses or children.

Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which was not involved in the Bezos investigation, said the Amazon chief's situation was "a reminder that the proliferation of commercial spyware is a global security problem for all sectors, from government and businesses to civil society."

Over the years that he has run Amazon, Mr. Bezos has largely kept private. That changed when The National Enquirer published photos and messages last year between him and Ms. Sanchez, a TV anchor. Mr. Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, later got a divorce.

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The WhatsApp message that contained a video file sent to Mr. Bezos from the account of Prince Mohammed. The file contained malware, investigators said in a forensic analysis. Credit... via FTI

On Feb. 7, 2019, Mr. Bezos went public with his claims. In a post on Medium, he accused The Enquirer of trying to blackmail him with his own text messages and photos and said he had asked Gavin de Becker, a private investigator, to determine how his phone had been hacked.

Ten days later, Mr. de Becker was advised by a "leading intelligence expert" to conduct a forensic analysis of Mr. Bezos' iPhone and to look for Saudi fingerprints in the hack, according to notes in the report. The report did not identify the intelligence expert who reached out to Mr. de Becker.

Mr. de Becker, who declined to comment, hired FTI Consulting on Feb. 24, 2019, to examine Mr. Bezos' phone. FTI was initially asked to look into several text messages that Mr. Bezos had received from the WhatsApp account of the Saudi prince. In mid-May 2019, Mr. Bezos handed over his iPhone X and asked FTI to run a full analysis on it, according to the report.

FTI zeroed in on an April 2018 dinner in which Prince Mohammed and Mr. Bezos had exchanged phone numbers in Los Angeles. After that, FTI found, the WhatsApp account of the prince initiated contact with Mr. Bezos repeatedly and without prompting.

The May 2018 message that contained the innocuous-seeming video file, with a tiny 14-byte chunk of malicious code, came out of the blue, according to the report and additional notes obtained by The New York Times. In the 24 hours after it was sent, Mr. Bezos' iPhone began sending large amounts of data, which increased approximately 29,000 percent over his normal data usage.

In the additional notes to the report, investigators said several phone apps were being used during the time that data was leaving the phone. Those included the Safari web browser and the Apple Mail program, both of which Mr. Bezos did not appear to be using heavily himself. Mr. Bezos did not have iCloud backup enabled on the phone, the notes added, which would have also explained large amounts of data leaving the phone.

Messages sent by Prince Mohammed's WhatsApp account starting in late 2018 soon began to suggest that the sender had intimate knowledge of Mr. Bezos' private life. On Nov. 8, 2018, the report said, Mr. Bezos received a message from the account that included a photo of a woman resembling Ms. Sanchez.

The photo was captioned, "Arguing with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree."

At the time, Mr. Bezos and his wife were discussing divorce, which would have been apparent to anyone reading his text messages.

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A text sent to Mr. Bezos from Prince Mohammed's WhatsApp account included a photo of a woman who resembled Lauren Sanchez, who Mr. Bezos was seeing. Credit... via FTI Cybersecurity

In mid-February 2019, Mr. Bezos held a series of phone calls with his security team about the Saudis' alleged online campaign against him, the report said. Two days later, Mr. Bezos received a message from Prince Mohammed's WhatsApp account that read, in part, "there is nothing against you or Amazon from me or Saudi Arabia."

The report listed spyware known as Pegasus, developed by the NSO Group, and spyware called Galileo, developed by Hacking Team, as the two most likely tools used to carry out the attack. The report added that Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of Prince Mohammed, owned a 20 percent stake in Hacking Team.

The FTI report was not definitive about the hack, but said it had "medium to high confidence" that the message from the prince's WhatsApp account was the culprit. In notes to the report, FTI said it was still attempting a more thorough analysis of the iPhone, including by jailbreaking it, or bypassing Apple's control system on the phone.

Some cybersecurity experts said more information about the hack was needed to verify the report's conclusions. Bill Marczak, a cyber expert at Citizen Lab, said in a blog post on Wednesday that technology existed for decrypting the WhatsApp messages to see more detail about the video file that was sent.

Agnes Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur who also co-wrote Wednesday's statement, said the episode was "a wake-up call to the international community as a whole that we are facing a technology that is very difficult to track, extremely powerful and effective, and that is completely unregulated."

She said Mr. Bezos' experience should sound alarms because even with his wealth and resources, it took months of investigation by specialists to figure out what had happened - a luxury few others have.

"It basically means that we are all extremely vulnerable," she said.

Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Beirut, and Karen Weise from Seattle.

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It most likely began with a tiny bit of code that implanted malware, which gave attackers access to Mr. Bezos' photos and texts. SAN FRANCISCO - On the afternoon of May 1, 2018, Jeff Bezos received a message on WhatsApp from an account belonging to Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

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the tech titans have their monopoly broken

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the tech titans have their monopoly broken

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Data is the new oil. Just as John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil swept up the spoils of the - initially competitive - oil rush, the future of the internet will be shaped by a handful of tech titans, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and their Chinese equivalents Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu. Today, around 90% of internet searches are via Google, and 94% of young people who use social media have a Facebook profile. Just 1% of smartphones use an operating system that isn't iOS or Android - made by Apple and Google.

But the challenge we now face has one key difference to that posed by the oil barons. Rather than price-fixing, many of the tech titans provide a largely "free" service to the public. Facebook and Google don't make most of their money through selling services to users, but through advertising. Amazon and Apple, meanwhile, do make money the traditional way, but corner their markets through other means, by squeezing suppliers in the former case or locking in users through software and hardware exclusivity in the latter. So why do these new monopolies pose a problem?

Firstly, because they hold back innovation. By acquiring potential challengers before they become a threat, spending millions lobbying governments to ensure their economic interests are protected, and tying in users through the sheer scale of features and social interaction they offer, the tech giants' dominant position often leaves entrepreneurs feeling they have no choice but to sell up, or close up. This is bad for innovation and bad for consumer choice - two things the tech giants once stood for.

In addition, the tech titans have lost the ability to monitor what content gets put on their own platforms. A small minority of users are posting terrorist propaganda, depictions of child sex abuse, and hate speech. State and non-state actors use these platforms to spread false information and influence elections, including the Brexit referendum and the recent US presidential election. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are either unable or unwilling to curb the misuse of the data they collect, and are increasingly seen as part of the problem.

Finally, the new internet giants operate in a largely borderless world where their main source of profit is intangible intellectual property rather than measurable "things". This is difficult to track and quantify, and has turned national tax authorities into largely powerless bystanders.

Of course, any new technology is open to abuse, and the internet has also been an outstanding force for good in its short history. It has empowered activists and investigative journalists in fighting for democracy and exposing corruption, and amplified important campaigns like the #MeToo movement and recent anti-gun marches in the United States.

But we stand at a crossroads. One way leads to monopoly and abuse. The other way continues the road to empowerment and liberation.

How should we respond? As liberals we must show that to be radical in this field is not to be statist. We do not accept a Hobson's choice between the entrenched private monopolies which are becoming the status quo, or direct state control over the internet, as is being developed in China. First, we must revive the trust-busting spirit of previous generations. Competition authorities should be primarily concerned with takeovers which stifle innovation or involve the acquisition of large quantities of valuable data. More radically, companies should be broken up when their size becomes economically detrimental.

One could imagine Amazon being split into three separate businesses: one offering cloud computing, one acting as a general retailer and one offering a third-party marketplace. Facebook could be made to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, Google could divest itself of YouTube - in the process creating new competitors for themselves.

Second, internet companies should be held accountable for extreme content posted on their platforms through the establishment of a new independent standards body governing the handling of such content. This would put an end to the current "wild west" approach of self-regulation and haphazard government responses to tech-company failures. This is preferable to the draconian system recently put in place by Germany, which has already led to excessive censorship by private companies and a backlog of court appeals and disputes.

Third, concerns over the manipulation of data can be met in part through greater transparency, requiring search algorithms to be made available to the authorities and by requiring commercially used databases to be available for a variety of uses. Such principles become even more important as the data giants develop the use of AI, where there is even more potential for monopoly abuse and manipulation.

Finally, we must entrench and expand the rights of people to own their personal data. The EU's new General Data Protection Regulation is a big step forward in this direction, but it clearly needs to be tested in practice. And it is just the beginning, not the end of the story. We should seriously consider the possibility of compensating people - or society more broadly - financially for the data they currently hand over for nothing.

All four of these suggestions require Britain to be a truly global nation, leading these debates rather than following on the coat-tails of others. The UK cannot do this alone. It will require a regulatory authority with far more clout. How tragic then, that the most effective competition authority in the capitalist world - one that has already fined Google €2.4bn for market abuse - is the European commission. As the world grows closer together, Britain commits an act of serious self-harm by doggedly setting itself apart from the power of shared sovereignty with our neighbours.

When it comes to regulating the new oil - data - Brexit is the equivalent of giving up shared influence over where, when and whether it rains, in return for absolute power over a compact umbrella.

* Vince Cable is leader of the Liberal Democrats and former secretary of state for business
Topics

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The tech titans must have their monopoly broken - and this is how we do it | Vince Cable

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Data is the new oil. Just as John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil swept up the spoils of the - initially competitive - oil rush, the future of the internet will be shaped by a handful of tech titans, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and their Chinese equivalents Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu.

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AI diagnosing Alzheimers through retina scanning

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AI diagnosing Alzheimers through retina scanning

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T HE DIFFERENT parts of a health-care system have different focuses. A hospital's dementia unit keeps records of patients' mental abilities. The stroke unit monitors blood flow in the brain. The cardiac unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the heart. Each agglomeration of equipment and data is effective in its own domain, but for the most part has little relevance to other bits of the body and the conditions that plague them. Thus, like the proverbial blind men feeling an elephant, modern health care offers many fragmented pictures of a patient, but rarely a useful cohesive one.

On top of all this, the instruments that doctors use to monitor health are often expensive, as is the training required to wield them. That combined cost is too high for the medical system to scan regularly, for early signs of illness, all patients at risk of dementia, heart disease or a stroke. Rather, doctors work to manage symptoms after a disease has obviously taken hold.

An unusual research project called AlzEye, run from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, in collaboration with University College, London ( UCL), may change this. It is attempting to use the eye as a window through which to detect signals about the health of other organs. The doctors in charge of it, Siegfried Wagner and Pearse Keane, are linking Moorfields' database of eye scans, which offer a detailed picture of the health of the retina, with information about other aspects of its patients' health garnered from other hospitals around England. This will allow them to look for telltales of disease in the eye scans.

The data set includes, whether they know it or not, every one of the 300,000 patients who visited Moorfields between 2008 and 2018 and was over the age of 40-though names and other easily identifiable information are not preserved. The idea is to examine changes to people's eyes within that ten-year period, and correlate these with, say, the emergence of Alzheimer's disease in the same patient. Building such a data set while respecting privacy and confidentiality has been a challenge. It took the doctors two and a half years to go through a series of ethics-committee approvals at Moorfields, UCL and NHS Digital, the body which handles agglomerated data from English hospitals. In order to create the database without the consent of the patients involved they invoked a special legal provision known as Section 251 assent, which comes with its own review process and, in essence, empowers senior government health officials to give consent on behalf of patients from whom it would be impractical or impossible to acquire such individually. The data sets were linked together on November 1st, and the process of correlation is now under way.

The Moorfields data set has a lot of linked cases to work with-far more than any similar project. For instance, the UK Biobank, one of the world's leading collections of medical data about individual people, contains 631 cases of a "major cardiac adverse event". The Moorfields data contain about 12,000 such. The Biobank has data on about 1,500 stroke patients. Moorfields has 11,900. For the disease on which the Moorfields project will focus to start with, dementia, the data set holds 15,100 cases. The only comparable study had 86.

Drs Wagner and Keane are searching for patterns in the eye that betray the emergence of disease elsewhere in the body, and are focusing first, as the name AlzEye suggests, on Alzheimer's disease. They will seek such patterns with the help of machine-learning algorithms that can crunch through imagery far faster than any human being, and which can spot far tinier variations. (The team has collaborated with DeepMind, a British artificial-intelligence firm co-founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who sits on The Economist 's board.) They may, it should be remembered, never find such patterns. Although there is circumstantial evidence that the back of the eye does change as its owner develops Alzheimer's, it may be that the changes are too subtle to be detected reliably enough for diagnosis. If such patterns could be recognised reliably, though, the potential impact would be huge. Even in rich countries, between 50% and 80% of Alzheimer's cases go undiagnosed. Moreover, even if the technique does not work for Alzheimer's, it might work for something else. Dr Wagner and Dr Keane therefore plan further searches for patterns related to strokes and heart disease. Even one relevant pattern would constitute a remarkable diagnostic leap forward.

Seeing is believing

If it does work, the technique the two researchers are proposing will be cheap to implement. An indication of how cheap is the project's total budget of just £15,000 (about $19,000). Equipment to perform an eye scan is becoming ubiquitous. Specsavers, which runs a chain of high-street opticians, now routinely offers the same sort of scans as Moorfields' in half of its 800 branches. Costco, a bulk retailer, offers scans in Britain for £24.99 a pop. An Israeli company called Notal Vision is building an eye-scanning device that is small enough to operate at home. The equipment and algorithms required to run machine learning on an eye scan are available to anyone, through cloud-computing services like Google and Amazon. Dr Keane once joked that he would like to see eye-scanning widgets become so cheap that they could be bundled in boxes of cereal.

This project will also act as a model for linking disparate health data together in a useful way while respecting patients' rights. Other such endeavours involving information-technology firms handling health data, such as Google's work with Ascension hospitals in America, or other parts of its subsidiary DeepMind's work with England's health service, have generated controversy because they offered no notice of their plans to patients. As well as jumping deftly through all the required legal and ethical hoops, Drs Wagner and Keane also posted notices around the hospital and on Moorfields' website, informing patients of the impending linkage. Besides explaining what was happening, these also noted the research's potential benefits. Not one person complained. ■

This article appeared in the Science and technology section of the print edition under the headline "A system based on AI will scan the retina for signs of Alzheimer's"

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A system based on AI will scan the retina for signs of Alzheimer's

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T HE DIFFERENT parts of a health-care system have different focuses. A hospital's dementia unit keeps records of patients' mental abilities. The stroke unit monitors blood flow in the brain. The cardiac unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the heart.

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The coronavirus is the first true social-media infodemic

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The coronavirus is the first true social-media infodemic

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On January 19-a week before the Lunar New Year-Tommy Tang left Shenzhen with his girlfriend to visit her family in Wuhan for the holiday. They had heard of the novel coronavirus (now officially known as COVID-19), but as far as they knew, it was localized to a small area. The local government had assured people that it would only affect those who visited a specific food market and contracted it directly from wild animals.

But on the night of the 20th, Dr. Zhong Nanshan-the same doctor who first revealed the extent of SARS in 2003-went on national TV to correct the record. The virus could spread from person to person, he said. Panic ensued. Overnight, everyone in the city began wearing masks. Tang and his girlfriend realized it was no longer safe to stay. They cancelled their plans and left on a train the next day. Less than 48 hours later, the city went into lockdown.

Back in Shenzhen, they placed themselves in a 14-day quarantine, leaving their apartment only once a day, with masks, to take out the trash. Tang, whose family also lives in Shenzhen, couldn't join them to celebrate the holiday. He wished his mother Happy New Year through his apartment door peephole. He ordered everything from food to soap and toilet paper through delivery apps like Meituan Waimai and Dada-JD Daojia. On the third day of quarantine, Tang went into a panic when he opened the apps to see everything completely sold out.

"There was nothing there-there were zero vegetables," he says. "But compared to Wuhan, we have it extremely easy," he adds.

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More than anything, the greatest source of anxiety has been the tortuous process of watching the news unfold on social media. It has mirrored and amplified his fears to levels he's never experienced before. He and his girlfriend have suffered insomnia and multiple panic attacks. They are terrified of contracting the virus and about her family's well-being.

"Honestly, it's really hard to describe what happened during these 14 days," he says. "There's nothing to do but read the news, and the news gets worse every day. That's the hardest part for the people outside."

On February 2, the World Health Organization dubbed the new coronavirus "a massive 'infodemic,'" referring to "an overabundance of information-some accurate and some not-that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it." It's a distinction that sets the coronavirus apart from previous viral outbreaks. While SARS, MERS, and Zika all caused global panic, fears around the coronavirus have been especially amplified by social media. It has allowed disinformation to spread and flourish at unprecedented speeds, creating an environment of heightened uncertainty that has fueled anxiety and racism in person and online.

For its part, the WHO has attempted to address the issue by partnering with Twitter, Facebook, Tencent, and TikTok to clamp down on misinformation. It recently launched a Google SOS alert, for example, to push WHO information to the top of people's search results for coronavirus-related queries. It has also been working with Facebook to target specific populations and demographics with ads that provide important health information. It has even gone so far as to reach out to influencers in Asia to try to keep disinformation at bay.

Social-media and health organizations have also engaged in efforts of their own. TikTok has tried to remove purposely misleading videos, saying in a statement that it would "not permit misinformation that could cause harm to our community or the larger public." Facebook has also worked to scrub posts with dubious health advice, and Tencent, the owner of WeChat has used its fact-checking platform to scrutinize coronavirus rumors circulating online.

But the sheer avalanche of content has overwhelmed the coordinated efforts to clear out all the noise. This in turn has created a breeding ground for xenophobic content. Racist memes and slurs have proliferated on TikTok and Facebook. Some teens have even gone about faking a coronavirus diagnosis to earn themselves more social-media clout. This online toxicity has also translated into in-person interactions. Asians have faced outright racism and harassment, and Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants have seen business lag.

Similar levels of discrimination have been reported (link in Chinese) in China against people from Wuhan and the larger Hubei province. In some cases, those who are stranded because they were traveling during the lockdown are being denied hotel rooms once their national IDs reveal their hometowns.

But as much as social media has perpetuated disinformation, it has been an important source of verified information as well. Journalists around the world have used Chinese social media to gain a more accurate picture of the situation and gathered and archived (link in Chinese) verified reports for posterity. The volume of personal anecdotes and reports that circulate every day about the ground truth in China has also pressured the government to release more accurate information about the crisis.

In the early days, for example, several doctors took to social media to raise alarms about the severity of the situation. Though the government swiftly reprimanded them and moved to control the flow of information, their warnings went viral, likely accelerating the government to be more forthcoming about the reality. Later, when one of the doctors, Li Wenliang died from the sickness, Chinese platforms lit up with an outpouring of anguish and rage, questioning the government's decision and authority. The discontent was so pervasive that it thwarted censors.

Such social-media activity could also be mined in the future to catch and track future disease outbreaks. Several services are already using these techniques to help public health officials monitor the coronavirus's progression. Raina MacIntyre, a biosecurity expert at the University of New South Wales, published an article in January in the journal Epidemiology that found that hot spots of tweets could be good indicators of how a disease spreads. "Especially where there is censorship or lack of resources for disease reporting," she says, this could help organizations react even earlier during a viral outbreak, stopping them before they become global health emergencies.

In a strange way, social media has also become a space for collective grieving. On Weibo and WeChat, stories of despair and kindness abound. Alongside expressions of fear from people stuck in quarantine and from patients unable to receive treatment are also anecdotes of people donating (link in Chinese), volunteering, and helping one another in unexpected and generous ways.

"Those personal stories-you don't read them a lot in international coverage of the outbreak," says Shen Lu, a journalist based in Boston who has been following Chinese social-media activity around the coronavirus closely. But they have become an important way for people to follow the crisis both within and outside China, serving as a form of catharsis and giving people, amid all the panic and toxicity, a small ray of hope.

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The coronavirus is the first true social-media "infodemic"

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On January 19-a week before the Lunar New Year-Tommy Tang left Shenzhen with his girlfriend to visit her family in Wuhan for the holiday. They had heard of the novel coronavirus (now officially known as COVID-19), but as far as they knew, it was localized to a small area.

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After the series of tragic mass shootings in El Paso, Tex., and Dayton, Ohio, and shocking murders in Ontario and British Columbia, all on the heels of the horrific events in Christchurch, New Zealand, we once again are having debates about the effects of video-game violence on society. We need to stop.

For police investigators, the presence of video games in the online habits of perpetrators may be one relevant piece of information. But for the rest of us, it's another example of our emotional reaction trumping (and I don't use that word lightly) evidence-based research.

I study emerging technologies and digital culture. In our field it's well-established: major studies show no link between violent criminal action and violent video games.

There is some evidence for a possible increase in aggressive tendencies after playing games for a period of time. Surveys of children find similar short-term aggressive play when kids watch any violent media (like a Marvel action film) - yet all of this falls radically short of criminal behaviour and violence.

I don't want to be an apologist for popular-culture media. We can and should make space to talk about the representations of gender-based violence and the representation of people of colour in video games (and in movies and on television). We should have a conversation about the online misogyny of Gamergate, and game voice-chats, as experienced by anyone who spends time in those online spaces.

But our conversations and our actions should be based on the real needs of society for representation and inclusion. They should be based on actual evidence, rather then a scapegoat used to score quick political points.

Trying to make sense of a violent world

When we hear about mass shootings in public spaces, we want something tangible to blame, so that we can feel that the world isn't unpredictable and unsafe. We want to feel like there's something we can do (as long as that "something" doesn't seem complicated).

We don't want to blame systems or cultures of violence, or talk about public health. Those seem unimaginably complicated, intractable and therefore won't make us feel better.

In the United States, it's hard to get funding to say anything real. Congress bans the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research into gun violence. This type of control leaves scholars worried that researching the wrong topic may destroy their careers.

And so journalists, politicians and pundits are left with a demonization of sub-cultures - in this case video-gaming - instead of talking about systemic issues.

Activision

I collect stories about media panics. In the 1800s, some demonized the novel, fearing it would drive women to ruin. And, going way back, Plato critiqued the invention of writing itself, fearing it would injure our memory. The earliest crusade against video-game violence I know of dates from the '70s, for the game Death Race. If your stomach is strong, go online to see the game as archived at the Museum of Play.

But now video games are mainstream. Three-quarters of U.S. households have at least one gamer resident. This is no longer a fringe activity. Pay attention, politicians: those kids who played Death Race? They grew up to be parents and voters. And many still play games.

So if we can't blame video games, what's next?

Looking for solutions

We have to look deeper and with more focus. Rather than stigmatizing the mentally ill, researchers at The Violence Project are studying what we do know about mass shooters, looking at actual data from people and events. They identified four commonalities on the part of the shooters: previous trauma (abuse, neglect, bullying), a recent crisis (loss of a job or a relationship), social contagion (studying the actions of other shooters) and access to weaponry.

To fight the problem, The Violence Project suggests we should:

End the practice of media-attention/notoriety (discourage press coverage; don't share or view videos or manifestos from the scene of a violent act).

Prevent the normalization of this behaviour (perhaps rethinking bulletproof backpacks).

Reduce access to the type of guns used in these tragedies.

Finally, the team found that most mass public shooters telegraphed their intentions in some way - perhaps on a message board, probably via social media. This seems like an area we can actively work to improve. If someone discloses violent action, people online might be uncertain about how dangerous the disclosure is. They may treat it as a joke or worry about damaging their social standing if they speak out.

(AP Photo/John Locher)

We need more ways to refer people to help without punishment. Users could flag an online post for follow-up by moderators without thinking it will immediately result in a SWAT team being called. A paid trained expert, able to approach people without criminalizing them until deemed necessary could make that determination.

If we start with a community-based public-health approach to people in need, as expensive as that may be, we can perhaps help a wealth of issues at the same time.

Invest in mental health supports

While not easy, these are findings we can act on. We can change the way we cover mass-shootings stories in the press. We can name and combat racist, gender-based and anti-immigrant rhetoric where we find it. We can critique, not ban, a culture that supports violence, with our kids, friends and co-workers.

And finally, we can provide long-term interventions across a variety of contexts (in-person, online, international) to connect people with the mental and social resources they need.

Ultimately, a path ahead doesn't exist solely in the realm of criminalization ( red flag laws) and restriction (video-game bans), but rather, includes pro-social actions like public health policies and affordable, accessible, community-based mental health supports.

I'm one of the wrong set of experts to call when investigators discover that a mass-shooter played video-games. Bring in those studying mass violence or public health, and let's put this red herring to rest.

[ Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today's news, every day. ]

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Why do we keep having debates about video-game violence?

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After the series of tragic mass shootings in El Paso, Tex., and Dayton, Ohio, and shocking murders in Ontario and British Columbia, all on the heels of the horrific events in Christchurch, New Zealand, we once again are having debates about the effects of video-game violence on society. We need to stop.

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Wealthy individuals are scrambling to lock down their privacy in the wake of the alleged hack of Jeff Bezos' iPhone, as personal cyber security experts warn that the rich and famous are increasingly becoming the target of sophisticated cyber criminals.

Several groups offering bespoke cyber security services to wealthy individuals told the Financial Times that they had received calls from panicked clients seeking advice, after a report last week alleged that Amazon founder Mr Bezos was hacked by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018 through messaging service WhatsApp.

Where traditionally hackers have tended to attempt to steal sensitive data from big corporations, experts note a "significant" rise in costly and disruptive cyber attacks on celebrities, executives and politicians over the past year.

It comes as geopolitical tensions are rising, with many nations investing heavily in cyber warfare, while the overlap in use of work and personal devices mean that VIPs - and their family or inner circle - are considered softer targets.

"Cyber security has been [traditionally] focused on BlackRock and JPMorgan - that's not the world any more," said Roderick Jones, founder of Concentric Advisors, which offers bodyguard services as well as online security protection to billionaires.

Mr Jones, who also founded Rubica, a company that provides more affordable digital protection for families, added that had he received "lots of inbound" inquiries last week from clients about how to better protect themselves from adversaries following the Bezos revelations.

"The new cyber warfare is going after your kids' iPad, not your executively controlled phone, he said.

Getting personal

While the market for enterprise cyber security is mature, attracting a record $5bn dollars in venture capital funding in 2018,a brisk business is now springing up to cater specifically for individuals.

"This most recent case brings to the forefront what many of our clients have been concerned about recently," said Mike White, who heads the private client and family offices division of security risk management group Hillard Heintze, and is a former US secret service operative charged with protecting presidents including Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

The nascent personal security marketplace spans tech start-ups that offer services to consumers such as secure password managers and virtual private networks for anonymous browsing, to covert outfits that act as clandestine "cyber bodyguards", monitoring and flagging up any unusual activity on a person's devices in real time.

Some outfits are building "threat intelligence" databases for sharing information on attacks on groups such as royals, for example, according to some with knowledge of the situation.

Mike Waters, director in the cyber security practice of Control Risks, said his firm was increasingly providing "executive threat exposure reviews" - scanning the web for any personal information that may have found its way on to social media sites and erasing it.

"This can be used . . . to create customised phishing . . . that will look very plausible," he said, referencing when cyber criminals try to trick users into downloading malicious software by opening an attachment, a so-called "social engineering" tactic that may have been used by Mr Bezos' attackers according to the recent report.

High alert

Motivations for attacks can be financial - criminals looking to access funds, or to extort money from a deep-pocketed individual - as well as political, where a perpetrator seeks leverage if a high-profile person is criticising a regime or doing a deal in a particular region, for example.

According to Mr Jones, many attacks on his high-profile clients over the past year appear to have been launched by Middle Eastern proxies -typically third-party groups who lurk on the dark web and aim to do the bidding of a nation state - rather than undertaken directly by the government.

"A lot of the states that do cyber capabilities have a history of proxies using physical warfare, and it's fairly controllable. In a digital space, that is uncontrollable - it goes faster and further," he said.

Recommended

This is only expected to worsen as the US remains on high alert for retaliatory cyber attacks from Iran, after a US drone strike killed the country's top military commander Qassem Soleimani earlier this year. In addition, relations between the west and Saudi Arabia have also been fraught after the kingdom was accused of the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post newspaper columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

In the event of successful hacks on clients, "most people end up paying a quarter of a million or higher to remediate", Mr Jones said.

The rise in breaches also comes as new technologies and ways of working - such as remote working or ''bring your own device" policies - can inadvertently expose the sensitive information of an individual and their workplace without their knowledge.

Meanwhile, the market for malware - malicious software that includes spyware, for the surveillance of targets without their knowledge, and ransomware, where hackers disable a victims' files or systems until they pay a ransom - has been ballooning and is being increasingly used to attack smartphones.

According to data compiled by RSA Security, 70 per cent of fraudulent transactions in 2019 originated on mobiles.

"The cache of data on these devices is just growing," said Marc Rogers, vice-president of cyber security at Okta, who runs the security team for the world's largest hacking conference, Def Con.

"[We've] seen a massive escalation of theft [from] mobile devices because criminals are realising that people are storing immense amounts of personal and financial information," he added.

Banking concern

It is not just security experts who are giving guidance. Bankers and wealth advisers have been warning wealthy clients about the risk of personal cyber attacks with increasing urgency in recent years.

One European bank's wealth management arm recently hosted a secret cyber security roundtable for clients at which the dangers were graphically illustrated by the live hacking of the phone of a European bank employee sitting in the audience. A specialist passed a small handheld device over the phone which extracted data in seconds.

"Cyber attacks on our clients are going to be a real problem. The weaknesses are internal [in client offices] - people, systems and processes," said Oliver Gregson, head of UK private banking at JPMorgan, the US bank. "The sophistication and speed of these attacks is increasing month by month and year by year."

In many cases, common sense is the best proactive defence, experts said. "People being curious or lazy is the biggest threat factor . . . not whether software or hardware has vulnerabilities," said Petros Efstathopoulos, global head of research at NortonLifeLock Research Group. "That is a fact of life."

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Rich and famous turn to 'personal cyber security' to protect phones

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Wealthy individuals are scrambling to lock down their privacy in the wake of the alleged hack of Jeff Bezos' iPhone, as personal cyber security experts warn that the rich and famous are increasingly becoming the target of sophisticated cyber criminals.

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8-year old boy leads YT top Earner list at $26m

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8-year old boy leads YT top Earner list at $26m

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An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys has been named as the highest earning YouTuber, for the second year in a row.

Ryan, of Ryan's World, earned $26m (£20m) in 2019, up from $22m in 2018, according to an annual top-10 ranking by Forbes, based on estimated earnings between June 2018 and June 2019.

YouTube accounts Dude Perfect and Nastya came in second and third, with $20m and $18m respectively.

And between them, the 10 highest paid YouTubers of 2019 earned $162m.

Dude Perfect features five friends in their 30s playing with toys such as Nerf guns and attempting various trick shots.

The Nastya channel features Anastasia Radzinskaya, who was born in southern Russia with cerebral palsy.

And Jeffree Star's account has dozens of videos of him giving makeup tutorials.

Forbes estimated pre-tax income from advertisements, sponsored content, merchandise sales and tours.

Ryan - who lives with his mother, father and twin sisters in Texas - usually releases a new video for his 22.9 million subscribers each day.

They frequently receive millions of hits - and a couple have more than a billion.

Last November, he told NBC people liked his videos because he was "entertaining and funny".

Ryan's most popular video, which has 1.9 billion views, is a five minute 56 second clip of him running around on an inflatable in his garden, retrieving plastic eggs with toys inside.

The youngster, whose estimated earnings doubled from 2017 to 2018, has rebranded his account from Ryan ToysReview to Ryan's World since last year's ranking.

But Ryan is something of an outlier, according to Chris Stokel-Walker, an internet culture writer and author of the book YouTubers.

"The vast majority of people who start a YouTube channel, or engage in any career as an influencer, won't make it," he told the BBC.

"96.5% of YouTubers don't make enough from advertising revenue alone to break the US poverty line - and with the number of creators on the platform constantly increasing, the competition is only getting tougher."

YouTube videos with children in them receive three times more views on average than other types of videos from high-subscriber channels, according a study from US think tank the Pew Research Centre.

Minecraft and Fortnite player Dan TDM (Daniel Middleton) is the only Briton to make the list. He dropped from fourth to ninth as his earnings fell $6.5m year-on-year.

PewDiePie jumped from ninth to seventh despite facing criticism for anti-Semitic and racist videos.

But Logan Paul, who showed the body of an apparent suicide victim last January, dropped off this year's list, as did his brother Jake, who came second in 2018.

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YouTube's top earners: Eight-year-old tops list

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An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys has been named as the highest earning YouTuber, for the second year in a row. Ryan, of Ryan's World, earned $26m (£20m) in 2019, up from $22m in 2018, according to an annual top-10 ranking by Forbes, based on estimated earnings between June 2018 and June 2019.

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Free Basics - ''it's digital colonialism': How Facebook's free internet service is self interested 

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Free Basics - ''it's digital colonialism': How Facebook's free internet service is self interested 

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Free Basics, Facebook's free, limited internet service for developing markets, is neither serving local needs nor achieving its objective of bringing people online for the first time.

That's according to research by citizen media and activist group Global Voices, published this week, which examined the Free Basics service in six different markets - Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines - to see whether it was serving the intended audience.

Free Basics is a Facebook-developed mobile app that gives users access to a small selection of data-light websites and services. The websites are stripped of photos and videos and can be browsed without paying for mobile data.

Facebook sees this as an "on-ramp" to using the open internet: by introducing people to a taster of the internet, they will see the value in paying for data, which in turn brings more people online and can help improve their lives.

However, the Global Voices report identifies a number of weaknesses in the service, including not adequately serving the linguistic needs of local populations; featuring a glut of third-party services from private companies in the US; harvesting huge amounts of metadata about users and violating the principles of net neutrality.

"Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things," said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. "It's building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That's digital colonialism."

To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to "zero-rate" the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services.

But many of the services with the most prominent placement - on the app's homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.

Alongside them are country-specific offerings, but their presence is determined by which companies have adapted their code to meet the requirements of the Free Basics platform, rather than those that meet local needs.

"The content does not include some of the important websites Ghanaians want to look at," said Kofi Yeboah, who researched the app in Ghana, noting that popular news websites such as MyJoyOnline and CityFM were missing.

In the Mexican version of the app, offered by Telcel, there's only one local site on the first page: for the foundation of the billionaire Carlos Slim, the CEO of Telcel. Bizarrely, the same app also offers two Nigerian websites and a regional news outlet for Argentina.

Free Basics is also restricted in terms of language. Kenyan users can choose an interface in English or Kiswahili, but most of the services are offered in English only. In Ghana, everything is in English, even though other languages, such as Twi and Hausa, are widely spoken.

When a user tries to access information outside of the tiny walled garden, a pop-up appears urging them to buy more data. For example, although Free Basics includes access to the Bing search engine and will show snippets of listings for free, reading any of the results of the search requires payment. On Facebook, this means people can see links to news and blogposts but can't read them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

The content on Free Basics is very limited. Photograph: Global Voices

"This means people are reacting to articles through clickbait headlines only and not by reading the whole article. It makes it difficult to detect fake news," said Mong Palatino, who studied the Philippines version.

This is particularly jarring given the way that Free Basics as advertised.

"The advertising implies that it's free internet, but then you actually use it and it's not really the full internet," said Palatino. "It misleads the public and makes them think these sites and services are the essential tools."

The promotion of certain sites and services through zero-rating the data also infringes on net neutrality, the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat everyone's data equally to prevent a tiered system, in which some content providers have an unfair advantage.

Facebook worker living in garage to Zuckerberg: challenges are right outside your door

It was these concerns, along with accusations of cultural imperialism, that scuppered the Free Basics launch in India (a move that led the Facebook board member Marc Andreessen to angrily tweet remarks that implied support for British colonialism).

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has argued that some internet is better than no internet.

"Arguments about net neutrality shouldn't be used to prevent the most disadvantaged people in society from gaining access or to deprive people of opportunity," he said on his Facebook profile in 2015.

It's an argument that doesn't wash with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Gennie Gebhart: "Facebook's efforts to bring the internet and more choice to people are laudable, but it's unclear if that's truly its goal. Facebook has a responsibility to its investors and that is being served by getting more eyeballs on its site, to lure users."

Whatever Facebook's true goal, Free Basics offers the company another treasure trove of data: all user activities within the app are channeled through Facebook's servers. This means Facebook can tell which third-party sites users are looking at, when and for how long.

Free Basics collects metadata relating to browsing activity. Photograph: Global Voices

"The program has created substantial new avenues for Facebook to gather data about the habits and interests of users in countries where they aspire to have a strong presence, as more users come online," said Global Voices.

In spite of its shortcomings, Free Basics has grown rapidly and, according to Facebook, is used by 50m people. However, it's mostly used by people who want to extend their mobile data package for free as opposed to connecting those who previously didn't have access to the internet - an audience Facebook has repeatedly stated it is trying to reach.

"It is not a great approach for bringing people online, but it's really good at saving costs for people already online," said Dhanaraj Thakur, of the Alliance for Affordable Internet.

"The narrative Facebook is concerned with is about increasing access, but there's a lack of empirical evidence. But that's the whole point of the project!"

Facebook refused to answer questions about how many people it had brought online for the first time, how it places content within the apps or how the company measures the success of the scheme. However, the company pointed out the report only looked at a few markets and that it is an open platform for which any content provider can adapt their services.

"Working with partners and developers on Free Basics, we're helping people around the world access impactful local services, including health resources, education and business tools, refugee assistance sites, and more," said a spokeswoman.

Thakur believes a better solution would be to give low-income groups a limited amount of free data to access the open web.

Even so, the cost of data is one of many problems that need solving to get the unconnected online, said Gebhart.

"The barriers to internet access include signal availability, device ownership, education, digital literacy and electricity - these are arguably far more elemental and urgent," she said.
Topics

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'It's digital colonialism': how Facebook's free internet service has failed its users

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Free Basics, Facebook's free, limited internet service for developing markets, is neither serving local needs nor achieving its objective of bringing people online for the first time. That's according to research by citizen media and activist group Global Voices, published this week, which examined the Free Basics service in six different markets - Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, Pakistan and Philippines - to see whether it was serving the intended audience.

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CHINA SURVEILLANCE / GOLDEN SHIELD PROJECT 

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CHINA SURVEILLANCE / GOLDEN SHIELD PROJECT 

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The Situation

While strict censorship is nothing new in one-party China, President Xi Jinping has tightened the online crackdown, particularly around the time of politically sensitive events like the death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in July. Ahead of the Communist Party Congress in October, China began blocking Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp messaging service and extended a clampdown on virtual private networks, a commonly used method to circumvent the Great Firewall. Securing China's "cyber sovereignty," or protecting the country's internet from undue foreign influence, is one of Xi's avowed goals. Recent moves to restrict online freedoms include measures that all but eliminate the ability to post social media anonymously, making app store owners responsible for how customers use their purchases and ordering online portals to stop news reporting. Pooh's temporary banishment came after bloggers depicted Xi as the cartoon bear. Meantime, foreign companies that want to operate on the mainland are forced to adopt practices often seen as invasive abroad. Apple Inc., which publicly fought efforts by the U.S. government to create backdoors into its products, has quietly deleted apps and built local data centers in line with Chinese government requirements. All this contributes to China having the least online freedom on the planet, according to rights group Freedom House.

Data for chart here.

The Background

China hasn't always had tight restrictions. When the web formally arrived in 1994, it was relatively free and seen as an extension of the Open Door policy of tapping Western knowledge to reform the economy. As its popularity grew, the government yielded to a sentiment expressed by former leader Deng Xiaoping: When you open the window, the flies come in. From 2000, the foundations of the Great Firewall were laid with the introduction of the Golden Shield Project, a database-driven surveillance system capable of accessing every citizen's record and connecting China's security organizations. Now, the government employs at least 50,000 people to enforce censorship, barring websites it disapproves of and forcing search engines to filter out content considered harmful. There's also an army of social-media influencers who, by one estimate, post 500 million pro-government comments a year. Crucially, the authorities make companies responsible for the content they show, even that generated by users, a practice that encourages self-censorship in a country where the state licenses all media. With an almost captive local market, China's tech giants - Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. - have flourished, in the process becoming important taxpayers in China. At the other extreme, Greatfire.org, a non-profit group that opposes censorship, has created mirrored sites and a browser to get around the controls.

The Argument

Most countries impose some sort of cyber control, like banning websites that promote hate. With more than half its 1.4 billion people online, China argues that the restrictions are mostly about maintaining social order and safeguarding national security. Proponents cite the worrying control over news flow exerted by the likes of Google and Facebook as a reason for the state to adopt an active role. Critics say China's Great Firewall reflects its paranoia over the internet's potential to spread opposition to one-party rule. As well as impeding freedom of speech, China's approach constrains it economically, they say, by stifling innovation, preventing the exchange of important ideas and cutting access to services used by businesses like Google Cloud. Academics cannot access Google Scholar, used globally by colleges to share work. More broadly, critics fear if Russia and other like-minded countries follow China's example and succeed in imposing restrictions on their citizens and global online companies, the vision behind the founding of the internet - an unfettered global exchange of information - could be seriously scaled back.

The Reference Shelf

Stanford University's Torfox project details the Great Wall's history.

Freedom House assesses China's internet freedom.

QuickTakes on China's virtual private networks and Xi Jinping.

Bloomberg profiles Greatfire.org.

China's technology restrictions explained and another story on censorship.

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter says China risks alienating its middle class by raising the Great Firewall too high.

Bloomberg Gadfly's Tim Culpan considers Apple's decision to remove VPN apps in China, as does Bloomberg View's Tyler Cowen.

To receive a free monthly QuickTake newsletter, sign up at bloombergbriefs.com/quicktake

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this QuickTake:
Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.net
David Ramli in Beijing at dramli1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this QuickTake:
Grant Clark at gclark@bloomberg.net

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So much for the lofty goals of the internet, breaking down information barriers and fomenting the free flow of ideas across the globe. China's online population of 731 million gets a highly restricted internet, one that doesn't include access to Google, Facebook, YouTube or the New York Times.

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CHINA SURVEILLANCE / FACIAL RECOGNITION 

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CHINA SURVEILLANCE / FACIAL RECOGNITION 

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China is deploying its mass surveillance system in an effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

As millions return to major cities and resume work, they will be subject to unprecedented monitoring.

New facial recognition and temperature scanning technology have been installed in public transport systems.

The government says it is being used to keep everyone safe.

But concerns are growing over the "big brother" use of data, giving police the power to create a digital authoritarian state.

Al Jazeera's Katrina Yu reports from Zhengzhou, China.

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Facial recognition: Concerns over China's widespread surveillance

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China is deploying its mass surveillance system in an effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus. As millions return to major cities and resume work, they will be subject to unprecedented monitoring. New facial recognition and temperature scanning technology have been installed in public transport systems. The government says it is being used to keep everyone safe.

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How hackers are praying on coronavirus fears 

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How hackers are praying on coronavirus fears 

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Security experts say a spike in email scams linked to coronavirus is the worst they have seen in years.

Cyber-criminals are targeting individuals as well as industries, including aerospace, transport, manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare and insurance.

Phishing emails written in English, French, Italian, Japanese, and Turkish languages have been found.

The BBC has tracked five of the campaigns.

1. Click here for a cure

Researchers at the cyber-security firm Proofpoint first noticed a strange email being sent to customers in February. The message purported to be from a mysterious doctor claiming to have details about a vaccine being covered up by the Chinese and UK governments.

The firm says people who click on the attached document are taken to a spoof webpage designed to harvest login details. It says up to 200,000 of the emails are being sent at a time.

"We have seen 35-plus consecutive days of malicious coronavirus email campaigns, with many using fear to convince victims to click," says Sherrod DeGrippo from the company's threat research and detection team.

Proofpoint says three to four variations are launched each day.

"It's obvious these campaigns are returning dividends for cyber-criminals," says Ms DeGrippo.

The best way to see where a link will take you is to hover your mouse cursor over it to reveal the true web address. If it looks dodgy, don't click.

2. Covid-19 tax refund

Researchers at cyber-security firm Mimecast flagged this scam a few weeks ago. On the morning they detected it, they saw more than 200 examples in just a few hours.

If a member of the public clicked on "access your funds now", it would take them to a fake government webpage, encouraging them to input all their financial and tax information.

"Do not respond to any electronic communication in relation to monies via email," says Carl Wearn, head of e-crime at Mimecast. "And certainly do not click on any links in any related message. This is not how HMRC would advise you of a potential tax refund."

3. Little measure that saves

Hackers pretending to represent the World Health Organization (WHO) claim that an attached document details how recipients can prevent the disease's spread.

"This little measure can save you," they claim.

But Proofpoint says the attachment doesn't contain any useful advice, and instead infects computers with malicious software called AgentTesla Keylogger.

This records every keystroke and sends it to the attackers, a tactic that allows them to monitor their victims' every move online.

To avoid this scam, be wary of emails claiming to be from WHO, as they are probably fake. Instead visit its official website or social media channels for the latest advice.

4. The virus is now airborne

The subject line reads: Covid-19 - now airborne, increased community transmission.

It is designed to look like it's from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It uses one of the organisation's legitimate email addresses, but has in fact been sent via a spoofing tool.

Cofense, the cyber-defence provider, first detected the scam and describes it as an example of hackers "weaponising fear and panic".

It says the link directs victims to a fake Microsoft login page, where people are encouraged to enter their email and password. Then victims are redirected to the real CDC advice page, making it seem even more authentic. Of course, the hackers now have control of the email account.

Cofense says the combination of a "rather good forgery" and a "high stress situation" make for a potent trap.

One way to protect yourself is to enable two-factor authentication, so that you have to enter a code texted or otherwise provided to you, to access your email account.

5. Donate here to help the fight

This example was reported to malware experts Kaspersky. The fake CDC email asks for donations to develop a vaccine, and requests payments be made in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

The premise is of course ridiculous, but the email address and signature look convincing.

Overall, Kaspersky says it has detected more 513 different files with coronavirus in their title, which contain malware.

"We expect the numbers to grow, of course, as the real virus continues to spread," says David Emm, principal security researcher at the firm.

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How hackers are preying on coronavirus fears

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Security experts say a spike in email scams linked to coronavirus is the worst they have seen in years. Cyber-criminals are targeting individuals as well as industries, including aerospace, transport, manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare and insurance. Phishing emails written in English, French, Italian, Japanese, and Turkish languages have been found.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Egyptian Internet Blackout Pushed to Streets 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Egyptian Internet Blackout Pushed to Streets 

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Yusuf Bagato, 21, edited video of interviews with protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 8. Videos by him and others have been posted on social networking sites like Facebook. Credit... Ed Ou for The New York Times

FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.

Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.

That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn't unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it.

"It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today's world," Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail.

Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted.

His description for Jan. 28: "Egypt is now officially offline."

In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less.

The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.

"Frankly, I didn't participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites' blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets," wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.

"It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled," he wrote. "Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, 'this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,' I went down and joined the protests."

For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. "During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day," he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. "Tell you what, I didn't miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter. Almost everyone sharing in a political discussion, trying to announce something or circulate news, even if they are rumors, simply retweets."

Laughing at how what is old is new again, Mr. Mohamed ended this e-mail passage with a smilely face icon.The idea that the Egyptian government could simply shut down the Internet (something Libya now does periodically) was a shock to outsiders — even a bit of a technical achievement. And the decision to do it ran against the grain of what had been the government's relatively open policy toward the Internet, said Andrew Bossone, who spent the past five years in Cairo writing about technology.

"When I went to Tunisia about a year ago, I couldn't get onto YouTube or Al Jazeera," Mr. Bossone said in an interview from Beirut, where he now lives. "Egypt didn't really block any Web sites."

He said the policy had raised expectations: "It's not just about Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It's about access to this technology that everybody else has. A sense of entitlement. The idea that everybody else has it, why can't I have it?"

Perhaps that sense of entitlement is behind the discussions that Mr. Gabr reported hearing. "Some friends are now even demanding, jokingly or seriously," he wrote, "that a new or amended constitution should emphasize on a non-negotiable 'right to Internet access' for everybody."

This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia's annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.

Filled with much of Egypt's technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn't accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government.

Moushira Elamrawy, an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria, remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians' connection to the world.

The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. "It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned — completely isolated from the world."

Ms. Elamrawy, who is 27 and trained as an architect but consults on development for free culture projects like Wikipedia, spoke by telephone from San Francisco, where she headed after spending the protests in Alexandria.

The protesters, she recalled, realized that in the time of darkness, it was particularly important to document what happened. They knew, she said, that at some point the Internet would be back, and people would want to know about the interim.

Ahmad Balal, a radiologist at Cairo University Hospitals who was a medical student during the Wikipedia conference in 2008, was one such chronicler. Mr. Balal wrote in an e-mail that his Facebook wall was the best way to relive what he experienced during the protests.

He had joined the protests at the start, on Jan. 25, but there is an eerie gap on his Facebook wall when the Internet was down, and friends from outside Egypt asked how he was but received no reply.

On Feb. 2, 5:18 a.m., when the Internet was back, he wrote in English, one of the few times he has: "The Internet is back to Egypt. Mr. Hosni Mubarak has offered it back to us after blocking it for only 5 days. Such a generous man!!!"

Forty-two minutes later, there appeared a photograph of a crowded Tahrir Square. The caption read, "I was there."

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Link by Link FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Rather, it is three days later - Jan.

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US health department targeted in cyber attack - CORONA VIRUS

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US health department targeted in cyber attack - CORONA VIRUS

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The US Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that it was hit by a cyber attack on Sunday, as experts warn that the country's healthcare system may be particularly vulnerable to attacks as it battles the coronavirus pandemic.

A spokesperson for the department said the federal government agency was investigating the matter after it "became aware of a significant increase in activity on HHS cyber infrastructure", but that it was still "fully operational".

"Early on while preparing and responding to Covid-19, HHS put extra protections in place. We are co-ordinating with federal law enforcement and remain vigilant and focused on ensuring the integrity of our IT infrastructure," Caitlin Oakley, the spokesperson, said.

The attack was first reported by Bloomberg, which cited anonymous sources saying that the hacking involved "multiple incidents" and appeared to be designed to slow the department's systems. However, they did "not do so in any meaningful way", the business wire service said.

Bloomberg also said the attack was linked to a text message-based disinformation campaign that wrongly suggested that there would be a nationwide quarantine on Monday.

Late last night the National Security Council tweeted: "Text message rumours of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown."

Cyber security experts have warned that hospitals and healthcare groups in particular could be targeted by nation states or cyber criminals at a time when they are overwhelmed by the outbreak across the country.

"We are moving into a scenario where hospitals are already under stress from Covid, and you could tip the system [over]," said Roderick Jones, founder of cyber security protection group Concentric Advisors. "If you're an attacker in Iran or Russia and wanted to cause maximum destruction to the US nation, it's an obvious target."

Hospitals have increasingly become the target of ransomware attacks over the past year - in which hackers disable a victims' files or systems and will only release the decryption key once a ransom is paid.

"If you are a ransomware attacker right now the payouts just got a lot high because having your system down just became deadly," Mr Jones noted.

More broadly, cyber groups have already discovered examples of phishing attacks that opportunistically aim to weaponise panic over the ongoing outbreak, for example by posing as authorities to get individuals to click on malicious links.

CrowdStrike, a cyber security firm, said it had found an attack from a China-backed group, dubbed Pirate Panda, targeting a variety of entities in east Asia using coronavirus as a lure. It also identified a similar attack targeting South Korea that it attributed to North Korea.

On Friday the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security's cyber arm, issued an alert urging companies to "adopt a heightened state of cyber security" when implementing remote working, as more workers are asked to telecommute.

The agency said "more vulnerabilities are being found and targeted by malicious cyber actors" as workers increasingly rely on "virtual private networks", or VPNs, and added that cyber actors could also "increase phishing emails targeting teleworkers to steal their usernames and passwords".

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US health department targeted in cyber attack

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The US Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that it was hit by a cyber attack on Sunday, as experts warn that the country's healthcare system may be particularly vulnerable to attacks as it battles the coronavirus pandemic.

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How deepfakes undermine truth and threaten democracy | Danielle Citron

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The Rise of #MeTooBots - New AI developed to detect sexual harassment in the work place.

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The Rise of #MeTooBots - New AI developed to detect sexual harassment in the work place.

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Artificial intelligence programmers are developing bots that can identify digital bullying and sexual harassment.

Known as "#MeTooBots" after the high-profile movement that arose after allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the bots can monitor and flag communications between colleagues and are being introduced by companies around the world.

Bot-makers say it is not easy to teach computers what harassment looks like, with its linguistic subtleties and grey lines.

Jay Leib, the chief executive of the Chicago-based AI firm NexLP, said: "I wasn't aware of all the forms of harassment. I thought it was just talking dirty. It comes in so many different ways. It might be 15 messages ... it could be racy photos."

Nex's AI platform is used by more than 50 corporate clients, including law firms in London.

The industry is a potentially fertile ground for the bots to examine: a third of female lawyers in Britain report having experienced sexual harassment.

The bot uses an algorithm trained to identify potential bullying, including sexual harassment, in company documents, emails and chat. Data is analysed for various indicators that determine how likely it is to be a problem, with anything the AI reads as being potentially problematic then sent to a lawyer or HR manager to investigate.

Exactly what indicators are deemed red flags remains a company secret, but Leib said the bot looked for anomalies in the language, frequency or timing of communication patterns across weeks, while constantly learning how to spot harassment.

Leib believes other industries could also benefit. "There's a lot of interest from clients across sectors such as financial services, pharmaceuticals," he said.

Prof Brian Subirana, a lecturer in AI at Harvard and MIT, said the idea of using AI to root out harassment was promising though the bots' capabilities were limited.

"There's a type of harassment that is very subtle and very hard to pick up. We have these training courses [about harassment] at Harvard, and it requires the type of understanding that AI is not yet capable of," he said.

The underlying issue is that AI can only reliably conduct basic story analysis, meaning it is taught to look for specific triggers. It cannot go beyond that parameter and cannot pick up on broader cultural or unique interpersonal dynamics. This means the bots risk leaving gaps or proving oversensitive.

"We don't know when AI will break the 'story understanding' frontier," Subirana said.

He added that if employees' correspondence gets flagged, it can create a climate of distrust, and offenders may learn how to trick the software. Alternatively, offenders could resort to other mediums of communication that are not monitored by the bots.

A further concern is protecting the confidentiality of the data that is collected. Subirana said if the software made a mistake and the data was leaked, internal communications between employees could be seen by rival companies.

"There are still hurdles to jump before AI can do what we think it can," Subirana said. "I haven't heard of any HR who has said it is useful for this yet."

He is not the only sceptic. Sam Smethers, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, a women's rights NGO, pointed out there could be unforeseen consequences from policing staff's communications.

"We would want to look carefully at how the technology is being developed, who is behind it, and whether the approach taken is informed by a workplace culture that is seeking to prevent harassment and promote equality, or whether it is in fact just another way to control their employees," she said.

"It has implications for the privacy of staff and could be abused", she added. She suggested educating staff about appropriate attitudes and behaviours would be more effective in protecting potential victims.

Despite the concerns, Subirana believes #MeTooBots could offer indirect benefits. "The use case that I could imagine is a training one. It could provide a database [of problematic messages]," he said.

He added that believingcommunications were being monitored could make people less prone to harass colleagues, in a placebo known as the Hawthorne effect. "There is a preventive element here," he said.

Similar technology is being used to retrospectively scour large volumes of digital communications to fight harassment claims.

One law firm using the technology is Morgan Lewis, which specialises in US employee and labour practice. But instead of monitoring employees, the AI is used to analyse clients' past communications.

"We've used this in dozens of cases," said Tess Blair, a partner at the firm. She said the tech usually helped build a case rather than providing the smoking gun.

Another AI startup, Spot, has created a chatbot that allows employees to anonymously reportsexual harassment allegations. It is trained to give advice and asks sensitive questions to further an investigation into the alleged harassment, which may have played out digitally or physically. Spot aims to account for gaps in HR teams' abilities to deal with such issues sensitively, while also preserving anonymity.

These variants of AI could work together to detect workplace harassment more effectively, Blair said. Tools such as Spot can be deployed before lawyers or HR staff are involved. If a full investigation proceeds, technology like Morgan Lewis's can analyse their clients' digital communications to build a case.

But however good the #MeTooBots become, Blair sees their role as assistants to humans rather than an all-seeing judge, jury and executioner.

"Computers are not value-judging, they are saying 'this doesn't fit the pattern'," she said. "It is then up to us to interpret."
Topics

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Rise of #MeTooBots: scientists develop AI to detect harassment in emails

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Artificial intelligence programmers are developing bots that can identify digital bullying and sexual harassment. Known as "#MeTooBots" after the high-profile movement that arose after allegations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the bots can monitor and flag communications between colleagues and are being introduced by companies around the world.

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Science fiction writers have had no end of fun imagining alternative realities and parallel worlds. Today, we are building them in digital form.

With the number of connected devices forecast to grow to 42bn by 2025, according to research group IDC, we are rapidly entering the era of "hyper-data". Each of those devices emits a constant stream of data, enabling us to build a digital cloud that will metaphorically encircle our planet. We can, to use the jargon, create "digital twins" of the real world.

Last week in New York, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, described the benefits of those digital twins, which he labelled one of the biggest trends in technology. Referencing Robert Gordon, the economic historian who has highlighted the stalling of innovation, Mr Nadella acknowledged that many economies were experiencing sluggish productivity growth. But Mr Nadella argued that increasingly sophisticated digital representations of the real world, enhanced by mass computing power and machine learning, would optimise information flows and catalyse economic growth.

Digital twins could also yield significant environmental benefits. "Bits will help atoms be more efficient by bridging offline and online," he said.

To take one example, he pointed to UK retailer Marks and Spencer, which is increasingly using in-store sensors to create digital twins of its retail space. It can then use those data models to optimise its stores' physical layout, monitor the temperature of its meat coolers and keep an eye on queues at its checkouts.

Similarly, factories can run far more efficiently and reduce waste if their operators are able to twiddle knobs in digital simulators and test ways to improve the run rate. "That changes the productivity of the manufacturing plant," Mr Nadella said.

Others talk about digital twins representing the "third wave" of the internet, after search and social media. The online world will evolve from a consumer internet to an enterprise internet, profoundly affecting the way we run roads, railways, airports, mines, factories, hospitals, power plants, distribution centres, construction projects and cities.

"The real world has always been offline. Now we are putting it online," says James Dean, co-founder of SenSat, a London-based geospatial data company backed by China's Tencent that is using drone and satellite imagery to map infrastructure. "If we can create a digital representation of the world and we can add some funky analysis then it gives us digital superpowers."

Mr Dean argues that digital twins can transform the construction industry, which has an appalling productivity record. SenSat is already modelling the route of the proposed HS2 railway line running from London to the north-west of Britain, creating some 18bn data points. That should help builders monitor the controversial project's progress to ensure smoother workflows, vital considering the project's big and growing cost overruns.

The vision behind digital twins is inspiring, but the unsettling experience of the consumer internet over the past two decades should alert us to the potential dangers.

Asu Ozdaglar, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and deputy dean of its new Schwarzman College of Computing, says that all such complex systems are inherently unpredictable. "The excitement around how these technologies can transform society is very real," she says. "But we should also be aware of their possible negative consequences."

The obvious concerns are security, privacy, surveillance and ethics that need to be addressed before these systems are deployed. She warns that "cascades" of problems can also result from extreme interconnectedness.

Take car navigation systems, such as Waze, for instance. Although they promise to reduce delays for drivers, they sometimes route traffic through residential streets where children play. They can also prove counterproductive by encouraging herd behaviour. Drivers can flood "quicker" routes, worsening congestion. Sometimes less information is more useful.

"You have to build carefully designed models and look at the empirical evidence. Whenever you provide incentives, you get some unintended results," Prof Ozdaglar says.

The explicit purpose behind MIT's Schwarzman College is to blend the insights of computer scientists and social scientists to address such complex challenges. Its aim is to produce "bilingual" experts.

Industry must do the same. The consumer internet, built on the mantra of "move fast and break things", has smashed too much crockery. The enterprise internet must continuously prove its social value in the real world.

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Letter in response to this column:
Balls is just the man to pull the UK into a single interactive model / From Nick Towers, Hampton, Middx, UK

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The birth of 'digital twins' will transform our world

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Science fiction writers have had no end of fun imagining alternative realities and parallel worlds. Today, we are building them in digital form. With the number of connected devices forecast to grow to 42bn by 2025, according to research group IDC, we are rapidly entering the era of "hyper-data".

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£10bn funding for tech companies in Europe as they try  to close the gap between US and China

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£10bn funding for tech companies in Europe as they try  to close the gap between US and China

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Investment in UK-based tech start-ups exceeded £10bn for the first time last year, jumping 44 per cent over 2018, as Europe finally starts to close its longstanding funding gap with the US and China.

The research, prepared by Dealroom and Tech Nation for the British government's Digital Economy Council, was published as the London-based venture capital firm Felix Capital, an investor in European breakouts Farfetch and Deliveroo, announced a new $300m fund.

Felix's new firepower follows a lucrative conclusion to 2019 for European venture firms. In November alone, a trio of European VCs together raised more than $1.5bn: Northzone, an early Spotify investor, announced a $500m fund; Balderton, a backer of Revolut and Darktrace, raised $400m; and EQT Ventures, part of the Swedish investment group, raised €660m ($730m).

"The pace of change in the last couple of years has really compounded," said Sonali De Rycker, general partner at Accel, who called it a "golden time" for Europe.

"In Europe in general, there is now a valuation of the investment opportunity in tech which for many years was dismissed by investors," said Frederic Court, founder and managing partner at Felix Capital.

Multibillion-dollar initial public offerings by Spotify, Adyen and Farfetch in 2018 were "exceptional outcomes at a global scale", Mr Court said. "Each of those companies were a top leader in its segment. Every fund that was involved early on with those companies has done extremely well."

Really, for the first time, there has been significant inbound interest from the US and Asia. Silicon Valley is still the epicentre of our industry but it has lost its monopoly

Paul Murphy, Northzone

Both start-ups and VCs themselves are also benefiting from an influx of capital from the US and Asia, as concerns grow about inflated valuations in Silicon Valley and China.

Silicon Valley-based firms such as Sequoia are investing more in European start-ups, while US and Asian pension funds, "funds of funds", family offices and endowments are showing more interest in becoming the "limited partners" that provide VC firms with capital to invest.

"Really, for the first time, there has been significant inbound interest from the US and Asia," said Paul Murphy, partner at Northzone, which raised $100m more in November than in its previous fundraise. "Silicon Valley is still the epicentre of our industry but it has lost its monopoly."

Johan Svanström, partner at EQT Ventures, said the same applied to his own fund's financing, predicting that high-profile blowouts in the US such as WeWork and the poor performance of Uber's IPO could help Europe, which has long been criticised for being too conservative in its entrepreneurial ambitions.

"While it's great that Europe is starting to have a bigger risk appetite, maybe the base of saneness actually helps," he said. "We are a little more self deprecating and logical about things."

Recommended

Despite some investors fearing that uncertainty surrounding Brexit would dampen UK tech investment, London continued to outperform other European capitals in start-up financings last year. UK-based tech companies raised £10.1bn of investment in 2019, up £3.1bn from 2018, more than France and Germany combined, according to research firm Dealroom and Tech Nation, a government-backed organisation supporting UK entrepreneurs.

But that could change after the UK leaves the EU at the end of this month, especially as many founders in London have come from abroad and recruitment from Europe becomes more difficult for British companies.

"The irony of Brexit is it just means there will be a reinforcement of the local ecosystems," said Mr Court, whose firm has also backed US ventures including Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle brand Goop and fitness company Peloton. "There will be less polarisation to London and less of an urge for talent to leave Paris, Berlin or Stockholm."

However, some sceptics of the current state of European tech fear that after years of a relative funding shortage, the market has quickly swung to having too much cash - without enough high-quality businesses in which to invest.

"There are a lot of things getting funded that shouldn't be," said one venture capitalist, who requested anonymity. That could cause problems when these companies need larger, later-stage investment, the investor added. "The debate will rest on the volume of supply [of capital] versus the volume of demand [from entrepreneurs]. The supply of cash has increased much faster . . . It's unclear if [VCs] can deploy it effectively."

But other investors remain more bullish.

The new VC funds raised last year are "not even scratching the surface of the opportunity in Europe", said Northzone's Mr Murphy. "There is a shortage of capital and a shortage of start-ups."

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UK-based tech start-ups enjoy £10bn funding bonanza

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Investment in UK-based tech start-ups exceeded £10bn for the first time last year, jumping 44 per cent over 2018, as Europe finally starts to close its longstanding funding gap with the US and China.

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What do Uganda's police force, a prison in Inner Mongolia and Zimbabwean airports have in common? All three are in the process of testing facial recognition systems and all three have used Chinese technology to do it. At least 52 governments are doing the same thing according to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Chinese facial recognition companies have taken the lead in serving this growing international market not least because of the advantage they have over peers in other countries: a massive domestic market and an authoritarian system where privacy often takes a back seat. According to IHS Markit, China accounted for nearly half of the global facial recognition business in 2018.

"There are protests around the world from Lebanon to Chile and Iraq, and a lot of these governments, whether it's liberal democracies or more autocratic, are in tenuous positions," says Steven Feldstein, a fellow at Carnegie, a US think-tank. "Now, there is technology available that allows them to fight back against political mobilisation."

Critics, and human rights campaigners, have accused Beijing and the surveillance companies of "exporting authoritarianism" via the technology that has been used at home as part of a security crackdown that has led to the detention of more than 1.8m people, predominantly Uighur Muslims, in the Xinjiang region.

Chinese companies may be the most successful, but they are not the only ones supplying surveillance technologies to governments. Rivals from Israel, Japan and America are competing to do the same, while often sourcing components from the US.

Research by Mr Feldstein into the global expansion of artificial intelligence surveillance found that Chinese tech companies - particularly Hikvision, the world's biggest surveillance camera vendor, Huawei, Dahua, and ZTE - have supplied countries ranging from Australia to Myanmar and Kazakhstan.

"These companies are particularly well-suited to provide [advanced surveillance capabilities]," says Mr Feldstein, "but also they are willing to go to markets that perhaps western competitors are less willing to go to."

On the roads leading into Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, surveillance cameras flash at every car passing in and out of the perimeter of the urban centre, capturing and analysing the identities of their occupants. Chinese telecoms company Huawei boasts that its cameras led to a 46 per cent drop in the regional crime rate in 2015. Local government figures suggest the impact was smaller, and only shortlived.

The company, which was blacklisted for allegedly posing a threat to US national security this year, has supplied surveillance equipment - including facial recognition - to roughly 230 cities worldwide stretching from western Europe to large swaths of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. It supplies more countries with AI video surveillance than anyone else according to Carnegie.

"Huawei has been investing heavily in the developing world in a way their telecoms provider competitors haven't. It is perfectly pitched for surveillance projects," says Henry Tugendhat, a researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "The governments have an interest in security and companies have an interest in selling."

But the question of who is driving the surveillance rollout is not straightforward. "I would beware of the idea that Africa is a blank slate, where the Chinese arrive bringing their oppressive ways," says Iginio Gagliardone, author of China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet. "Companies are spinning their products to fit the political demands of African elites."

Hikvision, which grew out of a government research institute, but is now only partially state-owned, has a growing international presence, supplying video surveillance infrastructure from Brazil to South Africa and Italy. It is one of a clutch of Chinese tech companies - along with Dahua, SenseTime and Megvii, among the world's leading artificial-intelligence software vendors - to have been blacklisted by Washington over alleged involvement in supplying technology used in Xinjiang.

Yet Chinese domination of the market shows no sign of waning. According to figures from IHS Markit China's market expanded by 13.5 per cent last year whereas the global market - excluding China - grew by just 5 per cent. In 2017 Chinese state media boasted that the country had built the world's biggest video surveillance system, employing over 20m AI-enabled cameras.

Chinese companies have previously operated under loose regulation at home and abroad, but are now facing challenges from the public unhappy at the expansion of facial recognition. Some 80 per cent of respondents in the country's first mass survey on the issue, released on Thursday, feared data leaks from facial recognition operators.

"When you're arguing with public bodies like the Beijing subway about their use of facial recognition, there's no point talking to them about data protection," Hong Yanqing, a scholar at Peking University, told a recent forum in Beijing. "Instead we need to have a debate about the appropriateness and proportionality of using [facial recognition]."

Mr Hong helped draft the government working group's report on personal data protection standards.

The widespread use of facial recognition in China is in part a reflection of how many activities already require real-name identification. Face scans have replaced or augmented human identity checks in hotels, boarding flights and trains, and at banks and hospitals. Regulations, which came into effect this week, require telecom carriers to scan the faces of users registering for mobile phone services.

But facial recognition is also being used to extend surveillance in new ways, such as tracking the classroom behaviour of students. The country's rapidly expanding network of facial-recognition cameras means many people are now subject to mass identification. China's police force already holds the world's biggest national database of over 1bn faces, captured for the national ID card system. Depending on the quality of these photos, they can be matched to people posing for a face scan.

The industry is beginning to pay attention to the complaints. SenseTime announced last week that it will lead a consortium of 27 companies to help set national standards for facial recognition, under the guidance of a government standards body. "The public is increasingly paying attention to the security problems faced by this technology," the company wrote in a social media post.

While debate over the use of facial recognition in the EU and the US is focused on the privacy threat of governments or companies identifying and tracking people, the debate in China is often framed around the threat of leaks to third parties, rather than abuses by the operators themselves.

China's courts received their first challenge to the commercial use of face scans in October. When a zoo in Hangzhou forced season pass holders to submit to face scans for entrance, Guo Bin, a professor at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, sued the zoo in order to keep his personal information private. Face traits are "sensitive personal data", he said in a court submission, arguing that the data could be leaked or stolen.

Most Chinese people approve of the use of facial recognition for convenience and improving security, but remain concerned about privacy abuses, according to Beijing's Nandu Personal Information Protection Research Centre, which conducted the mass survey.

The installation of an in-class facial monitoring system at the China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing in September sparked widespread online criticism. As part of a new "smart campus" system, the school installed face scanners in two classrooms to track attendance and to catch students dozing, playing on their phones and talking in class. It "effectively solves the difficult problems of managing attendance and low efficiency", the school says.

Recommended

In response, China's education ministry said the department would add restrictions and regulations on the use of facial recognition in schools, and hoped they would be "highly cautious" in using the technology.

While Chinese companies are dominant in the global facial recognition market, their position is coming under pressure from rivals such as Japan's NEC which supplies similar technology in 14 countries, and US groups like IBM, the software company Palantir and Cisco.

"Companies from other countries including Israel and Russia are very advanced in this space, and are making a play in markets such as the United States, and regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia, which is significantly under-reported," Mr Feldstein says.

Israeli companies like AnyVision and Elbit Systems have supplied technology to the US, while Ukrainian start-up Riddletag uses Amazon's facial recognition technology to allow access to passengers in the Tbilisi subway in Georgia.

"US companies, for all the lip service they pay to technology and ethics, are also building surveillance tech, and indeed supplying Chinese companies that produce it," says Stephanie Hare, an independent researcher of facial recognition technology and ethics, and a former employee of Palantir. "This leaves everyone else with a decision: be spied on by the US or by China? This point was made in the German parliament last week, and the US was very upset about it, saying there can be no moral equivalence between China's authoritarianism and US values."

Meanwhile, China's surveillance industry is already moving on to the next frontier of computer image recognition: identifying people by the way they walk and trying to read their emotions.
Additional reporting by Nian Liu and Ryan McMorrow in Beijing This article has been amended to refer to a prison in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia

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Facial recognition: how China cornered the surveillance market

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What do Uganda's police force, a prison in Inner Mongolia and Zimbabwean airports have in common? All three are in the process of testing facial recognition systems and all three have used Chinese technology to do it. At least 52 governments are doing the same thing according to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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The Uighurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group of around 12 million in northwest China, are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity.

As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs, the image on their ID is matched to their face.

If they try to pass without these items, a digital device scanner alerts the police.

But even complying with the rules won't necessarily keep them out of trouble. During random spot-checks the police at times demand that an individual hands over their unlocked phone which the police then examine manually or plug into a scanner.

I did ethnographic research with Han and Uighur migrants for more than 24 months between 2011 and 2018 in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in northwest China. During this period, I was affiliated with the Xinjiang Arts Institute. My position allowed me to interview hundreds of Han and Uighur people. I read and speak both Uighur and Chinese so I was able to communicate with people in their own language.

When I first began my research in the region, smartphone use was not that tightly controlled by the police. But by 2018 it had became common knowledge among my Uighur interviewees that if they did not carry their phone with them or failed to produce it they could be detained.

The Uighur internet

The Uighur majority areas on the border of Central Asia only became a fully integrated part of China in the 2000s. They were effectively colonized when millions of non-Muslim Han settlers moved into their community in the 1990s and 2000s to extract natural resources such as oil and natural gas.

Earlier they lived much more autonomously in desert oasis towns and villages much like the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, a group that shares a similar history and language as the Uighurs.

In 2011, the Chinese government built 3-G networks in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Cheap smartphones soon became available in local markets of this region and Uighurs began to use the new social media app WeChat.

WeChat, which is owned by the Chinese company Tencent, was put into general use across the whole country in 2012 after Facebook and Twitter were banned in 2009.

Smartphones became a common feature of daily life for millions of Uighur villagers. At the time, the way Uighurs used them was unique. In other parts of China, the Chinese language was used in social media communication. Uighur uses Arabic script-radically different from the character based Chinese-and acted as a form of coded speech that state censors couldn't understand.

When I began my research project, I was interested in the way online culture produced forms of Islamic, Chinese, and Western identity and the way it brought people of different ethnicities together.

I found that Uighurs used smartphones differently than other internet users. On traditional internet sites that required text-based communication, Uighur web users faced tighter forms of censorship since state authorities viewed them as potential terrorists. They were viewed this way since Uighurs had long protested the way their briefly independent nation had been subsumed by China and their religious practices were restricted, lashing out violently at times.

Using WeChat on smartphones gave Uighurs the ability to circulate short audio messages, videos, and images. Beginning in 2012 this allowed Uighurs to develop semi-autonomous forums in Uighur spoken language.

Initially Chinese state authorities did not have the technical capabilities to monitor and control Uighur oral speech or Uighur text embedded in images as memes. They could turn the Uighur internet on and off, but they could not fully regulate what Uighurs said because they spoke in another language.

Based on hundreds of interviews and my own observations Uighurs used these forums to discuss cultural knowledge, political events, and economic opportunities outside their local communities.

Over the course of only a few years, online Islamic teachers based in the region and elsewhere in the Islamic world, in places like Turkey and Uzbekistan, became influential throughout Uighur social media. Their messages focused primarily on Islamic piety. They described what types of practices were halal, and how people should dress and pray.

According to scholars Rachel Harris and Aziz Isa, the vast majority of those who began to study Islam by smartphone were simply interested in instruction on what it might mean to be a contemporary Muslim, something they felt was lacking in government-censored state-run mosques.

The Uighur internet as a space of surveillance

But Chinese state authorities interpreted it differently.

They regarded the Islamic appearance and practice of Uighurs, such as young men growing beards and praying five times per day, as signs of what state authorities described as the " extremification " of the Uighur population.

They began to link violent incidents, such as a suicide attack in the city of Kunming in Eastern China, to what government officials told me was the " Talibanization " of the Uighurs.

In response to this Chinese authorities declared what they called a " People's War On Terror." They began to use techniques of counterinsurgency, a mode of military engagement that stresses mass intelligence gathering, to assess the Uighur population.

As part of this process, in 2016, they began to collect biometric data, such as DNA, high-fidelity voice recordings, and face scans, from the entire population of the region in order to track the activities of people on WeChat and in their daily lives using their voice signature and faceprint.

They also began a process of interviewing millions of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to determine who could be categorized as trustworthy or "normal" as stated on official population assessment forms. In order to determine this, state authorities mapped out the person's social network and history of Islamic practice, both in their local community and online.

Since the total Muslim population of the region, including other Muslim groups such as the Kazakhs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and others, is around 15 million, these assessments and activity checkpoints required the deployment of more than 90,000 police officers and more than 1.1 million civil servants.

The majority of the security forces are of Han ethnicity. Han people are settlers in the Uighur region. They are not Muslim, they do not speak Uighur, and many of my Han interviewees described the Uighur culture as "backward," "primitive," or even "dangerous."

In order to aid in this assessment process, state authorities also contracted with Chinese private technology firms to develop software programs and hardware that could comb through the images, videos and speech recordings in the WeChat histories of a targeted person in a matter of seconds.

The Uighur internet as a trap

Through this process around 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims were determined "untrustworthy" and scheduled for detention and reeducation in a massive internment camp system.

Government procurement records show that the camp facilities have " no blank spots" outside the vision of surveillance cameras and that the camp workers are often armed with tasers and other weapons.

In the prison-like camps, the detainees were held in crowded dormitory cells where they studied Chinese, learned the political thought of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of China's ruling political party, and confessed their past crimes. In many cases, these crimes were related to their internet use.

Since more than 10% of the adult population has been removed to these camps, hundreds of thousands of children have been separated from one or more of their parents. Many children throughout the region are now held in boarding schools or orphanages which are run by non-Muslim state workers.

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For China's Muslim minority, the internet was a safe haven-until it wasn't

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The Uighurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group of around 12 million in northwest China, are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity. As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs, the image on their ID is matched to their face.

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new data, new policy. The UK and CoronaVirus

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new data, new policy. The UK and CoronaVirus

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A week is a long time in a coronavirus pandemic. Within days of Boris Johnson and his advisers announcing that anyone with symptoms of a cold should stay at home for seven days but otherwise live life as normal, the prime minister came out with a series of bombshells that will effectively confine most of the population to their homes.
Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus
What changed was new data on the impact of Italy's out-of-control epidemic on its health service. Basically, it is catastrophic, with 30% of hospitalised patients having to be admitted to intensive care. The teams of modellers at Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who advise government crunched those numbers - and the death toll and pressure on the NHS that came out were unacceptable.

Prof Neil Ferguson at Imperial College's MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and colleagues found that the mitigation strategy, as they called it - or scenario 1 - that the government had just announced would lead to 260,000 deaths. That would be not just deaths from the virus, but from other illnesses that the NHS would be too hard-pressed to treat.

Their modelling looked at all the interventions that might help drive down the infections and deaths. There were five, they said, that would have an impact:

* isolating people with a cough and temperature at home for seven days.

* quarantining families where somebody has symptoms for 14 days, to allow time for any symptoms in the others to show.

* social distancing, involving cutting the normal contacts people make at home, school or work by three-quarters.

* social distancing for everyone over 70, by asking them to stay at home.

* closure of schools and universities.

Last week's mitigation strategy was about people staying home for seven days with symptoms. It was said that quarantine for families plus keeping the over-70s at home would probably follow. That package would reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds and cut deaths by half. But, the researchers said, "the resulting epidemic would still likely result in 260,000 deaths and therefore overwhelm the health system (most notably intensive care units)".

So now we have scenario 2, which the modellers call suppression. It takes things much further, adopting all the measures except closing schools and universities. And school closures, said Ferguson, are probably also on the cards before too long.

Graphic - how the UK's policy compares with other European countries'

Ferguson and his colleague Prof Azra Ghani liken the new measures to China's actions, which succeeded in driving down the epidemic to very low numbers. But unlike in China, anything that happens in the UK will be voluntary. The government will need population buy-in for this to work.

The bad news is that although it will keep death rates down to 20,000 or possibly just a few thousand, said Ferguson, we are looking at these social curbs through to July or August - and even when the brakes are taken off, they may have to be slammed back on again. The virus will not have disappeared and could resurge. Only a small proportion of the population will have been infected, recovered and become immune.

The government's earlier hopes that it could rely on large proportions - maybe 60% - of the population getting ill, getting better and becoming immune to build up some herd immunity in the UK population are dashed by this strategy, which many experts thought was dangerous anyway. Herd immunity is normally created by vaccinating large numbers of children, safeguarding those who cannot be inoculated. Nobody has ever tried to do that by allowing infection with a disease before - and now, it appears to have been recognised that it's not safe to try.
Topics

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New data, new policy: why UK's coronavirus strategy changed

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A week is a long time in a coronavirus pandemic. Within days of Boris Johnson and his advisers announcing that anyone with symptoms of a cold should stay at home for seven days but otherwise live life as normal, the prime minister came out with a series of bombshells that will effectively confine most of the population to their homes.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Kashmir Internet shut down 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - Kashmir Internet shut down 

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India's Supreme Court has given the government a week to review its suspension of internet services in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The region has not had access to the internet for more than 150 days, India's longest such shutdown.

The government suspended internet, mobile phone and landline services in Kashmir before stripping it of partial autonomy on 5 August.

The court was responding to a clutch of petitions challenging the restrictions.

"Complete curb of internet must be considered by the state only as an extraordinary measure," said Justice NV Ramana, reading out the judgement on Friday, adding that access to the internet was part of the right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by the constitution.

The three-judge bench also ruled that the indefinite suspension of internet services is "impermissible" and such restrictions can "be temporary only".

Some mobile phone and landline services were restored in October, but the indefinite internet suspension has crippled daily life, the media and businesses.

The move by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to revoke the region's autonomy was controversial as it underpinned Kashmir's fraught relationship with Delhi. India has also been fighting a long-running insurgency in the Muslim-majority valley.

The second-longest internet shutdown in India was also in Kashmir - it lasted from 8 July to 19 November in 2016. But the blackout this time -which also initially included phone services - has severely hurt the region's economy. A range of businesses, from IT services to trade are struggling to operate.

A colonial-era law, known as section 144, which prohibits a gathering of more than four people to prevent violence or any disruption of law and order, has also been imposed in the region.

But the court ruled that the law cannot be used "as a curb on legitimate expression of democratic rights." It ordered the government to review all orders imposing such restrictions within seven days.

While the government has maintained that the region has been largely calm, it has also said the restrictions have been in place to prevent violence.

In October, parliament also formally divided the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two new federally-administered territories, which are now ruled directly from the capital Delhi. Union territories have far less autonomy from the federal government than states do.

It's widely believed that this was done to tighten the Indian government's control over the part of Kashmir it administers.

India's longest shutdowns:

159 days and counting: Internet services were suspended on 4 August in Jammu and Kashmir this year

133 days: An internet shutdown in Indian-administered Kashmir which lasted from 8 July to 19 November in 2016

99 days: Authorities shut off the internet in India's West Bengal state from 18 June to 25 September in 2017

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India court criticises Kashmir internet shutdown

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India's Supreme Court has given the government a week to review its suspension of internet services in Indian-administered Kashmir. The region has not had access to the internet for more than 150 days, India's longest such shutdown. The government suspended internet, mobile phone and landline services in Kashmir before stripping it of partial autonomy on 5 August.

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apple privacy software allowing users to be tracked

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apple privacy software allowing users to be tracked

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Google researchers have exposed details of multiple security flaws in its rival Apple's Safari web browser that allowed users' browsing behaviour to be tracked, despite the fact that the affected tool was specifically designed to protect their privacy.

The flaws, which were ironically found in an anti-tracking feature known as Intelligent Tracking Prevention, were first disclosed by Google to Apple in August last year.

In a soon-to-be published paper seen by the Financial Times, researchers in Google's cloud team have since identified five different types of potential attack that could have resulted from the vulnerabilities, allowing third parties to obtain "sensitive private information about the user's browsing habits".

"You would not expect privacy-enhancing technologies to introduce privacy risks," said Lukasz Olejnik, an independent security researcher who has seen the paper. "If exploited or used, [these vulnerabilities] would allow unsanctioned and uncontrollable user tracking.

"While today such privacy vulnerabilities are very rare, issues in mechanisms designed to improve privacy are unexpected and highly counter-intuitive."

Apple rolled out Intelligent Tracking Prevention in 2017, with the specific aim of protecting Safari browser users from being tracked around the web by advertisers' and other third-parties' cookies.

The tool is seen by privacy advocates as a pioneering privacy-enhancing technology for web browsers, and has forced competitors including Google's Chrome browser to augment their own tracking controls.

"Unlike other approaches . . . ITP runs its algorithms on-device, which makes it able to detect [user] behaviour and 'learn' about them automatically," said Mr Olejnik. "But this user-specific aspect is also partly why the risk of information leaks was possible."

According to the Google researchers, the vulnerabilities left personal data exposed "because the ITP list implicitly stores information about the websites visited by the user".

The researchers also identified a flaw that allowed hackers to "create a persistent fingerprint that will follow the user around the web", while others were able to reveal what individual users were searching for on search engine pages.

Apple addressed the security flaws, without revealing any details, in December, when privacy engineer John Wilander published a blog post about security updates to its browser software. In it, he thanked Google's researchers "for sending us a report in which they explore both the ability to detect when web content is treated differently by tracking prevention and the bad things that are possible with such detection".

"Their responsible disclosure practice allowed us to design and test the changes detailed above," he added.

Apple confirmed it patched the issues reported by Google last year.

This is the second time in the past year Google researchers have revealed security flaws in Apple software. In August, the search company also named a series of websites that were delivering targeted attacks to iPhones owned by the Uighur minority in China. Google confirmed it had authored the paper and said Apple has acknowledged its help in identifying these issues last year.

In a statement, Google said: "We've long worked with companies across the industry to exchange information about potential vulnerabilities and protect our respective users.

"Our core security research team has worked closely and collaboratively with Apple on this issue. The technical paper simply explains what our researchers discovered, so others can benefit from their findings."
Additional reporting by Richard Waters in San Francisco

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Apple's privacy software allowed users to be tracked, says Google

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Google researchers have exposed details of multiple security flaws in its rival Apple's Safari web browser that allowed users' browsing behaviour to be tracked, despite the fact that the affected tool was specifically designed to protect their privacy.

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All mobile phone users in China registering new SIM cards must submit to facial recognition scans, according to a new rule that went into effect across the country on Sunday.

The guidelines, first issued in September, require telecoms companies to deploy "artificial intelligence and other technical methods" to check the identities of people registering SIM cards. All physical stores in the country have had until 1 December to begin implementing the new standards.

The measure, described by the ministry of industry and information as a way to "protect the legitimate rights and interest of citizens in cyberspace", makes Chinese mobile phone and internet users easier to track.

Already, mobile phone users are required to register SIM cards with their identity cards or passports and many telecoms had begun scanning customers' faces since last year. Many social media platforms also require users to sign up with their "real-name identities" via their phone numbers.

The expansion of the use of facial recognition in China, from middle schools to concert venues and public transport, has begun raising concerns about information security and consent.

In November, a professor filed what is believed to be the country's first lawsuit against the use of facial recognition. Guo Bing, a professor at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University alleged that a safari park in Hangzhou violated the country's consumer rights protection law by scanning his face and taking his personal data without his consent.

China's education ministry said in September it would "curb and regulate" the use of facial recognition after parents grew angry when facial recognition software was installed without their knowledge at a university in Nanjing to monitor students' attendance and focus during class.

Experts also caution that China lacks regulation on how facial recognition can be used. More than two dozen Chinese technology companies have begun drafting national standards for the industry.

Human rights advocates described the measure as another step toward "dystopian surveillance state", in which Chinese cities will more closely resemble the Xinjiang region, where citizens are constantly monitored for signs of unrest or dissent.

The ministry has said the rule will protect citizens from phone scams and prevent the reselling of SIM cards as part of cybersecurity and antiterrorism campaigns.

On the microblog Weibo, many internet users were supportive of the move, with one writing: "As someone who has had their identity stolen, I feel relieved." Another said: "Even though this is coming too late, I support it."

But others were not confident the new rule would strengthen information security. One user wrote: "If privacy laws are not sound ... then you really do not have the right to require more and more personal information from the people. We just want to live in a society where our information is safe. Why is it so difficult?"

In response to mobile phone users submitting to face scans, one commentator said: "I will not. My number has already been sold and now my face will be too? Another said: "Please leave us with some privacy."

"There is not even a little space for freedom. Everything is controlled. You cannot say what you want or choose what you want," another said.
Lillian Yang contributed additional reporting

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China brings in mandatory facial recognition for mobile phone users

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All mobile phone users in China registering new SIM cards must submit to facial recognition scans, according to a new rule that went into effect across the country on Sunday. The guidelines, first issued in September, require telecoms companies to deploy "artificial intelligence and other technical methods" to check the identities of people registering SIM cards.

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China's most popular messaging app, Tencent-owned WeChat, has been censoring keywords about coronavirus since as early as January 1st, an analysis found. Popular Chinese livestreaming platform YY has been censoring coronavirus content, too.

To make this determination, the research group Citizen Lab scripted group chat conversations and sent them to three test WeChat accounts, two in Canada and one in China. The chat conversations consisted of article headlines and text. The group, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto, sent them from one of the Canadian WeChat accounts to the Chinese one, and observed which messages the Chinese account got. 132 keyword combinations were censored in January, but that number rose to 516 keywords by the second week of February.

On WeChat, 384 new censored keywords were added in two weeks in February

On YY, which is similar to Twitch or Mixer, 45 keywords were added to a blacklist on December 31st, 2019; five of those keywords were removed on February 10th, Citizen Lab found. YY's blacklist is in the app itself, unlike WeChat's, which uses a remote server for censorship.

Public health officials from China first informed the World Health Organization about the virus at the end of December. The censorship has been going on since at least January 1st, and continued through the most intense part of the outbreak. WeChat has a monthly active user base of over one billion people - which means that a lot of users may have missed important information about the coronavirus, as well as how to prevent its spread.

Censored keywords included factual information on the disease, references to the government's epidemic policies, and the name of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was among the earliest to warn the population about the disease. Li caught the disease while treating coronavirus patients and died on February 7th. His story created public outcry against the government's handling of the coronavirus.

It's not clear why the two companies decided to censor coronavirus keywords

It's not clear why the two companies decided to censor keywords about coronavirus, though it's possible they were ordered to do so by the Chinese government. WeChat has close ties with the Chinese government, and the government has already used WeChat and Twitter to track down people Chinese officials felt were sharing negative information about the coronavirus outbreak.

The censorship is particularly pernicious because the WeChat is a crucial part of many Chinese people's lives, David Jacobson, a professor of global business strategy at SMU's Cox School of Business and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told BuzzFeed News. "As a platform, you can live your life with it," Jacobson said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "You can pay for things. You can do so much more."

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WeChat has been censoring keywords about coronavirus, study finds

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China's most popular messaging app, Tencent-owned WeChat, has been censoring keywords about coronavirus since as early as January 1st, an analysis found. Popular Chinese livestreaming platform YY has been censoring coronavirus content, too. To make this determination, the research group Citizen Lab scripted group chat conversations and sent them to three test WeChat accounts, two in Canada and one in China.

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coronavirus, Oman lifts ban on encrypted call apps

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coronavirus, Oman lifts ban on encrypted call apps

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - why the revolution will not be tweeted

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - why the revolution will not be tweeted

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At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

"I'd like a cup of coffee, please," one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

"We don't serve Negroes here," she replied.

The Woolworth's lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. "You're acting stupid, ignorant!" she said. They didn't move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn't move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. "I'll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College," one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro's "Negro" secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. "Here comes the wrecking crew," one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine's College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. "I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus," the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. "The answer was always the same: 'It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.' " Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade-and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country's Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn't want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. "Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy," Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. "You are the best hope for us all," James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, "give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was 'eating our lunch on the Internet.' That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation."

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova's so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism's critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests-as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post-may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. "It is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right," Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran." The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. "Western journalists who couldn't reach-or didn't bother reaching?-people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, "The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past-even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet." But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. "I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled 'Boo,' I think I would have fallen off my seat," one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as "burr-head nigger." A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.

The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. "No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night," they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers-Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman-were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo-that attacks deeply rooted problems-is not for the faint of heart.

What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn't, as might be expected, ideological fervor. " All of the applicants-participants and withdrawals alike-emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program," he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant's degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts-the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities-and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a "strong-tie" phenomenon.

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was "critical friends"-the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.

So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter-David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil-was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair's in A. & T.'s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil's room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth's. They'd discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, "Are you guys chicken or not?" Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn't like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That's why you can have a thousand "friends" on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances-not our friends-are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It's terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

In a new book called "The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change," the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It's a perfect illustration of social media's strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia's business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia's plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That's the only way you can get someone you don't really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and-in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need-spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn't a trivial matter. But it doesn't involve financial or personal risk; it doesn't mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn't require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it's the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don't understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. "Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation," Aaker and Smith write. But that's not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation-by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, "We wouldn't necessarily gauge someone's value to the advocacy movement based on what they've given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It's not something you can measure by looking at a ledger." In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a "fever." But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting "movement centers"-a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the "fever" into action.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, "The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement," a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. "Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures," Morris writes. "Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation."

This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren't controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn't have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that's what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.

There are many things, though, that networks don't do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don't have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can't think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?

The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: "Structural features typical of networks-the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms-made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife."

In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, "the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings." They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.

The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn't interested in systemic change-if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash-or if it doesn't need to think strategically. But if you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott's organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with "military precision." By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.

Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations-which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement-are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King's task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham-discipline and strategy-were things that online social media cannot provide.

The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody." Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna's lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.

When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his "white ass" didn't deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha's boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under "lost," rather than "stolen," which essentially closed the case. "By this point millions of readers were watching," Shirky writes, "and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story." Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as "stolen." Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend's Sidekick back.

Shirky's argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age-and he's right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn't have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates "the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause" in the Internet age.

Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, "What happens next?"-no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

Clarification: This piece's account of the Greensboro sit-in comes from Miles Wolff's "Lunch at the Five and Ten" (1970).

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Five years after Egyptian protests led to the demise of Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, analysts continue to debate the effect of social media and the government's move at the time to cut off access to the internet.

Facebook and Twitter - the protesters' most powerful weapons that helped them to spread messages and set up demonstrations - were suddenly severed in January 2011.

Hackers immediately focused on getting around the block. They began using proxy computers to beat government censors. They set out to "anonymise" online data and focused on getting information to the internet by bouncing content to computers in other countries.

It was the activist group "We Rebuild" that provided one of the most ingenious solutions. With dial-up modems, they managed to connect to the internet in Sweden. Out of the reach of Egyptian authorities, this allowed them to set up an Egypt Wiki page - a "how-to" list for activists to get online and stay connected.

Protesters also resorted to handheld signs during the demonstrations. If you could not look down at your phone for updates, you could look up and find signs that explained where and when to gather next.

But some observers say the role played by social media has been overblown.

"Social media has certainly played a part in the Arab Spring revolutions but its effect is often exaggerated on the inside," said Sultan al-Qassemi , a columnist based in the United Arab Emirates.

Qassemi used Twitter to translate speeches from Arabic into English and provided nearly non-stop updates on the protests sweeping the region. "Egypt was disconnected from the outside world for days and yet the movement never stopped," he said.

While there are conflicting views on the importance of social media during the protests in Egypt, a study showed a major rise in online engagement about Egypt during the uprising.

The week before Hosni Mubarak's resignation, the total rate of tweets about Egypt surged from 2,300 a day to 230,000 around the world.

One unintended consequence of cutting internet access was it may have pushed more people on to the streets, said one analyst.

"The government made a big mistake taking away the option at people's fingertips," said Professor Mohammed el-Nawawy, from Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Arab Spring anniversary: When Egypt cut the internet

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Five years after Egyptian protests led to the demise of Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime, analysts continue to debate the effect of social media and the government's move at the time to cut off access to the internet. Facebook and Twitter - the protesters' most powerful weapons that helped them to spread messages and set up demonstrations - were suddenly severed in January 2011.

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - the triumph of occupy Wall Street 

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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS / INTERNET - the triumph of occupy Wall Street 

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The movement that began in Zuccotti Park didn't disappear-it just splintered and regrouped around a variety of focused causes.

Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

On her first campaign stop in Iowa in April, Hillary Clinton struck a decisively populist tone, declaring that "the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top." Later, she sharpened her rhetoric on income inequality by comparing the salaries of America's richest hedge fund managers with kindergarten teachers.

Clinton isn't alone. Democratic presidential challenger Bernie Sanders has spent the spring railing against the excesses of Wall Street greed while calling for a financial transactions tax and a breakup of the big banks. Even leading Republican contenders have jumped on the inequality bandwagon: Jeb Bush, through his Right to Rise PAC, asserted that "the income gap is real," while Ted Cruz admitted that "the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our income nationally than any year since 1928," and Marco Rubio proposed reversing inequality by turning the earned-income tax credit into a subsidy for low-wage earners.

Nearly four years after the precipitous rise of Occupy Wall Street, the movement so many thought had disappeared has instead splintered and regrown into a variety of focused causes. Income inequality is the crisis du jour-a problem that all 2016 presidential candidates must grapple with because they can no longer afford not to. And, in fact, it's just one of a long list of legislative and political successes for which the Occupy movement can take credit.

Until recently, Occupy's chief accomplishment was changing the national conversation by giving Americans a new language-the 99 percent and the 1 percent-to frame the dual crises of income inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics. What began in September 2011 as a small group of protesters camping out in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park ignited a national and global movement calling out the ruling class of elites by connecting the dots between corporate and political power. Despite the public's overwhelming support for its message-that the economic system is rigged for the very few while the majority continue to fall further behind-many faulted Occupy for its failure to produce concrete results.

Yet with the 2016 elections looming and a spirit of economic populism spreading throughout the nation, that view of Occupy's impact is changing. Inequality and the wealth gap are now core tenets of the Democratic platform, providing a frame for other measurable gains spurred by Occupy. The camps may be gone and Occupy may no longer be visible on the streets, but the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is still there, and growing. What appeared to be a passing phenomenon of protest now looks like the future of U.S. political debate, heralded by tangible policy wins and the new era of activist movements Occupy inaugurated.

One of Occupy's largely unrecognized victories is the momentum it built for a higher minimum wage. The Occupy protests motivated fast-food workers in New York City to walk off the job in November 2012, sparking a national worker-led movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In 2014, numerous cities and states including four Republican-dominated ones-Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska, and South Dakota-voted for higher pay; 2016 will see more showdowns in New York City and Washington, D.C., and in states like Florida, Maine, and Oregon. From Seattle to Los Angeles to Chicago, some of the country's largest cities are setting a new economic bar to help low-income workers.

The tidal wave didn't come from nowhere. The grassroots movement composed of fast-food workers and Walmart employees, convenience-store clerks, and adjunct teachers seized on the energy of Occupy to spark a rebirth of the U.S. labor movement. This renaissance was most recently visible on April 15, when tens of thousands of workers marched in hundreds of cities to demand better pay and conditions. McDonald's and Walmart have responded with incremental wage hikes, and Senate Democrats this spring called for raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour. As Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, a socialist who rose to prominence with the Occupy movement, put it, "$15 in Seattle is just a beginning. We have an entire world to win."

Occupy also reshaped the U.S.-environmental movement, which had its rebirth in fall 2011 when 1,200 people were arrested in Washington, D.C., protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. As people gravitated to Occupy encampments, teach-ins, and demonstrations across the country, that energy easily transferred into the fight against climate change. This was especially true on college campuses, where a student-led divestment movement has rid more than $50 billion in fossil-fuel assets from universities and institutional investment funds worldwide.

Occupy prompted a grassroots anti-fracking movement that pushed cities, counties and states to enact bans on the controversial drilling process-from Athens, Ohio, to Mendocino County, California, and in states like New York and Maryland. Last fall, those movements coalesced into the world's largest climate march when 400,000 protesters descended on New York City to demand robust cuts in emissions and investments in renewable energy. President Obama has responded to the growing pressure by mandating new carbon cuts for power plants, signing a first-ever emissions-slashing deal with China, and vetoing a Republican measure to push through Keystone (although his decision in May granting permission for Shell to drill in the Arctic struck many as a disturbing reversal of his climate promises).

When it comes to money in politics, Occupy also drew mainstream attention to the corrosive influence of wealth on the political process. That helped spur a nationwide movement as 16 state legislatures and more than 600 U.S. towns and cities have passed resolutions to overturn Citizens United and draft a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and money is not speech. In April, the "We the People Amendment" to outlaw corporate personhood was introduced in the House by a Democratic coalition led by Representatives Rick Nolan (Minnesota), Jared Huffman (California), Keith Ellison (Minnesota), Matt Cartwright (Pennsylvania), and Raul Grijalva (Arizona). The message has resonated on both sides of the aisle, as presidential candidates from Clinton to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham call for a new era of campaign-finance reform to remove big money from electoral politics.

The student-debt crisis is another magnified arena where the Occupy protests shouted first and loudest-and in which serious policy shifts are now afoot. Occupy offshoot movements like Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee, and Debt Collective are tackling America's $1.3 trillion college-debt conundrum by buying back student debt for pennies on the dollar and forgiving it. Those movements also spurred a rebellion by student debtors, known as the Corinthian 15, who in April celebrated the closure of the for-profit Corinthian College chain, which they had accused of deceptive marketing and deliberately steering students into high-cost loans. In January, President Obama addressed the burgeoning crisis by introducing a $60 billion plan to make all community college free for two years. And in late April, nine Democratic Senators joined a list of 60 Congress members supporting a resolution to institute four-year, debt-free college nationwide-a dramatic departure from piecemeal proposals of the past.

Most significant, perhaps, is how the debate over inequality sparked by Occupy has radically remade the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator-who-is-definitely-not-running-for-president and the party's most dynamic leader, launched her political career in 2012 with the 99 percent movement's message of Main Street versus Wall Street. Since entering the Senate, Warren has drafted numerous bills to address income inequality, including the 21 st Century Glass-Steagall Act that would separate investment banking from commercial banking and the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act that would allow students to refinance college loans at a lower federal rate. By fighting to strengthen financial regulations in Dodd-Frank, break up "too big to fail" banks, and impose stiff taxes on corporations and the wealthy, Warren is the closest thing to an Occupy candidate the movement ever got. And now an army of elected populists in both the Senate and House is unifying around her.

On a local level, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio swept into office last year on a 99-percent-style "tale of two cities" campaign to address income inequality. He has since expanded pre-K education for tens of thousands of students, created municipal ID cards for undocumented immigrants, increased affordable housing, and guaranteed sick days for workers in America's largest city. De Blasio now leads a national task force of mayors who hope to aggressively tackle the wealth gap in their cities-something scarcely imaginable before Occupy reshuffled the political deck.

Occupy was, at its core, a movement constrained by its own contradictions: filled with leaders who declared themselves leaderless, governed by a consensus-based structure that failed to reach consensus, and seeking to transform politics while refusing to become political. Ironic as it may seem, the impact of the movement that many view only in the rearview mirror is becoming stronger and clearer with time. Since the Great Recession, shareholder profits, CEO pay, and corporate tax breaks have soared while average household wealth continues to sink, college debt skyrockets, living costs increase, real wages decline, and the middle class struggles to survive. The world's 1 percent now possess almost as much combined wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And while no one in Washington may have the full answer about how to fix income inequality, everyone, it seems, is now grasping for a solution.

It won't be easy. Wresting power from the ruling financial elites will be an ongoing challenge, and ending big money's grip on politics lies at the core of this effort. But business as usual must change because the planet can't wait, and the people can't, either. Occupy got the diagnosis correct. It also charted the course for concrete legislative reform. It's now up to elected officials to achieve much bigger results-and for the grassroots movements to continue driving those policies into being. Because as millions of Americans learned following the election of Barack Obama, real change doesn't come in slogans: It comes when the people demand it.

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Michael Levitin is an editor and the co-founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

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The movement that began in Zuccotti Park didn't disappear-it just splintered and regrouped around a variety of focused causes. On her first campaign stop in Iowa in April, Hillary Clinton struck a decisively populist tone, declaring that "the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top."