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When you unlock your phone, step in front of a security camera or pass by a license plate reader at night, beams of infrared light – invisible to the naked eye – shine on your face, your body, the unique shape of your license plate letters. Those infrared rays allow cameras to pick out and identify individual humans.
Over the past decade, facial recognition technology has gone from science fiction fantasy to worldwide reality – nowhere more so than ChinaHome to more security cameras than the rest of the world combined.
At airports and railway stations, passengers line up at the gates and for facial scanning by officials.
On the roads, cameras scan for pedestrians and vehicles breaking traffic rules.
According to the law, anyone registering a new SIM card in China must show images stored in the telecom database to a face scanning camera. And until recently, Sugar Officials require most guests to scan their faces when checking-in to hotels.
For many people, such technology has offered convenience and security, woven seamlessly into the background of their lives. But for some, it has become an intrusive form of state control.
associated Press The investigation found that such surveillance systems were largely designed and manufactured in China American Companies are playing a much larger role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. This has strengthened the rule of the Chinese government Communist PartyThis provides the state with a powerful tool to control and monitor perceived threats such as dissidents, ethnic minorities, and even its own officials.
Dozens of people who spoke to the AP, ranging from Tibetan activists to ordinary farmers to a former vice mayor, said they were being tracked and monitored by a vast network of cameras spread across the country, disrupting their movements and alerting police to their activities.
For years, such technology faced legal hurdles in the United States, the country where it was first developed. But over the past five years, the U.S. Border Patrol has vastly expanded its surveillance powers, monitoring millions of American drivers across the country in a secret program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it considers suspicious, the AP found.
Under the Trump administration, billions of dollars are now being poured into a wide range of surveillance systems across the US, including license plate readers, which have ensnared innocent drivers for little more than making quick trips to areas near the border.
In this series of photographs, an infrared filter was used on a modified camera to capture the full spectrum of light, including ultraviolet, visible and infrared.
This filter, which cuts out some visible light to better reveal infrared, is red by design to block certain light wavelengths.
AP photographers on three continents captured photos showing how these beams are used to track vehicles and people, enable facial recognition — and ultimately, digital control.
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This is a documentary photo story curated by AP Photo editors.