China’s 500 megapixel camera is capable of mega-facial-recognition

Stop bragging about how many megapixels your snazzy new prosumer DSLR camera has China has beaten you to it. Researchers there have just announced a 500mp camera. Rather than taking stunning vacation photos, though, one of the most likely uses for this wide-angle, beer crate-sized device is for identifying people dozens of meters away using facial recognition.

Fudan University worked with the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop the camera, which takes both pictures and video in unparalleled detail. ABC’s story suggests that this is five times the resolution of the human eye, but scientific imaging specialist Roger Clark says that the human eye has an effective resolution of around 576mp.

Whichever figure you believe, 500 megapixels (or 0.5 billion pixels) is more than enough to pick out faces in a stadium or on a street corner with the camera’s built-in facial recognition techniques.

This should have your privacy alarm bells ringing, but that’s just one part of the story. There’s also the possibility of a link with China’s emerging social credit system (SCS). Designed for a full national rollout in China next year, it assigns points for activities deemed socially acceptable, like donating blood and doing volunteer work, while subtracting them for negative actions like jaywalking or not showing up for restaurant reservations.

Apparently, in some local prototypes, telcos show you a message when calling someone on the social credit system’s blacklist telling you that the person you’re calling is dishonest. We didn’t think that we’d find ourselves living in Black Mirror’s excellent Nosedive episode for a while yet, but oh well, here we are.