Artificial Intelligence and FinTech

Imagine that a friend invites you to a concert with your favourite musician performing. Wow, what a great friend, huh? As you and your friend enter the lively concert venue, you notice an impressive kiosk covered with multiple screens showing video footage of your favourite musician performing. You stop for a few minutes to watch some of the videos cycle through and now you’re really excited for the concert and head to your section ready for a great show.

Like you and your friend, thousands of other concertgoers also stopped at the kiosk to watch videos in preparation for the concert. However, what neither you, your friend, nor the other concertgoers realized was that while all of you were watching videos, cameras embedded in the kiosk were also watching and taking photos of you. Your image along with most of those other fans that stopped in front of the kiosk were captured and analysed by facial recognition technology.

You see, your favourite musician has a number of stalkers who have made various threats over the years, so the facial recognition analysis was a precaution to identify anyone who might potentially be dangerous.

Does this seem like a scene out of a movie? Or is this a type of technological Big Brother intrusion that seems at least a few years off?

This may be surprising to many of you, but this story is not an imaginary future, it is actually the past and describes what occurred at a Taylor Swift concert in May 2018 as reported by the New York Times.

Besides sharing what was until now our secret, undercover interest in Taylor Swift, this story raises a few important concepts worth exploring. Now we don’t claim to have all the answers, but we’ll share some of our thoughts, and we invite you to consider these questions as well.

First, given the potential threat of stalkers, were the actions of setting up a covert photo-taking kiosk and using facial recognition technology reasonable? And, would your opinion change if someone was caught versus if someone wasn’t caught? And should it?

Second, and more broadly, should people be informed that they are being recorded and that the images are being analysed, processed and potentially being included as part of a database?

At the Taylor Swift concert, the cameras were not readily visible. But the reality for most people, especially in urban locations, is that we are really under near constant surveillance already.

To use another concert example, famous Canto-Pop singer Jacky Cheung has developed a reputation for being an unwitting crime buster. From 2018 to 2019, a total of 80 fugitives were arrested either inside or at the gate of his concerts in different cities of China. How is that possible you may ask? It turned out that the police used facial recognition software to surveil all the concertgoers in order to catch the criminals on the run.

In another example from China, this public surveillance was highlighted by BBC reporter John Sudworth back in December 2017. Now, it is estimated that there are at least 170 million surveillance cameras all over China and the plan is to install upwards of 400 million cameras over the next few years.

Mr. Sudworth visited the city of Guiyang, the capital city of the Guizhou Province of China, which is actually only a few hours from us here in Hong Kong. While in Guiyang, Mr. Sudworth participated in a little exercise, where he was tasked with avoiding detection from Guiyang’s network of cameras for as long as possible. Guiyang is home to about 4 million people, so it’s not a small place. How long do you think he was able to evade detection?

He was discovered and detained by authorities in about 7 minutes.