US commentators have been quick to point to the growing surveillance capacities of the Chinese government powered by the network of cameras and more powerful facial recognition technologies. Such capacities are viewed as both positive and negative depending on the uses to which they are put. Tracking individual citizens can be useful as in the case of gathering data for public health purposes or dangerous as in the case of efforts to identify citizens for possible sanctions. In any case the concentration of surveillance technologies in the hands of the government is viewed as a potential threat.
With the focus on China, the potential for similar surveillance in the US is easy to overlook. So, as Zak Doffman reports in a recent post, the capacities for surveillance in the US that are available to the US government are somewhat surprising. The surprise is not that the US government might surveil citizens; the surprise is that are doing it by accessing privately held databases developed for marketing purposes.
For a more extensive discussion of the organizations with access to data and the automated tools to make sense of it all in the US and China, see Amy Webb’s book, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity. Webb explains that the differences between China and the US can be explained by the differences in the relationships between major AI powers and the state.
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