Pierluigi Paganini
February 20, 2019
We have debated for a long time the surveillance campaigns conducted by the Chinese government, now the news of the day is the discovery of a misconfigured database containing data from facial recognition allegedly carried out by China.
The database was discovered by the popular Dutch security researcher
Victor Gevers, it contained details about surveillance activities conducted by the Chinese government and that was aimed at tracking people of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China.
The archive is a MongoDB operated by the Chinese firm SenseNets that also provides facial recognition solutions.
The government of Beijing Chinese is utilizing facial recognition databases for months to monitor Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region.
According to Gevers, the exposed archive contains data of about 2,565,724 users, including names, ID card numbers, sex, nationality, ID card’s issue and expiration dates, home addresses, photographs, date-of-birth, and employment information as well as GPS coordinates.
The expert also found GPS coordinates associated with the people under surveillance and a list of trackers for locations of public cameras from which the footages were obtained.
The surveillance cameras are located in public locations like mosque,
hotel, police station, internet café, and restaurant. Gevers also revealed that the database was regularly being updated, in 24-hours he noticed that 6.7 million GPS coordinates were added to the archive.
Gevers’s discovery confirmed the concerns about the abuse of facial recognition for surveillance purposes, even if Chinese authorities always denied the accusation for the violation of minority rights.
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(SecurityAffairs – China, facial recognition)
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