China: Unsecured facial recognition database leaks, thousands of kids from 20 schools, half are majority Tibetan areas

An unsecured facial recognition database that contained info on thousands of children from 20 schools in China, half of which are located in historically ethnic Tibetan areas, has been found online.

This latest facial-recognition database leak raises new questions about ethnically targeted school surveillance and cybersecurity in China, writes Liza Lin in the Wall Street Journal:

The cache was connected to a surveillance system labeled “Safe School Shield” and contained facial-identification and location data, according to Victor Gevers, a researcher at the Dutch nonprofit GDI Foundation, which scans the internet for vulnerabilities and flags them to owners for fixing.

Found in the database were these frontal pictures of children in the schools, used to train algorithms to spot them as they passed the #surveillance cameras. pic.twitter.com/HoW2lSCG1H

— Liza Lin (@Liz_in_Shanghai) January 20, 2020

While gov­ern­ment surveillance is broadly ac­cepted, the use of fa­cial recog­ni­tion and other types of track­ing tech­nolo­gies in schools has proven a flashpoint. https://t.co/Vg5otN0U79

— Paul D. Shinkman (@PDShinkman) January 19, 2020

That thing where surveillance is invasive and also incompetent. https://t.co/9EuvRWXphZ

— Eva (@evacide) January 17, 2020

[Paywalled link]

Thousands of Chinese Students’ Data Exposed on Internet

[via techmeme]