China seems to love their facial recognition technology. The country has deployed it for use to help identify and catch wanted criminals, and they’ve also used it to identify students who are not paying attention and might be napping in class. Now it looks like they plan to use the technology again to help curb public housing abuse.
According to a report from The Beijing News (via South China Morning Post), the abuse of public housing is apparently a problem where there are some who sublet their properties out to others. The idea behind public housing is to provide an affordable place to stay for people who genuinely cannot afford other types of housing, but unsurprisingly its low-cost has led to some abusing it for personal gain.
To combat this problem, Beijing is expected to introduce facial recognition systems to public housing, where only when it matches the faces stored on a database will the doors open. This means that if owners who try to rent it out to others will not be able to as the system will not recognize the renters and will not let them in.
For those concerned about privacy, the system does have some benefits to it. It will keep an “eye” out for the elderly where if it detects that they have not left their home in a set period of time, it will prompt the building’s management to check in on them to make sure that everything is ok.