Human Rights Watch has urged the Chinese government to stop building big data policing platforms to store personal information of its population, calling it a violation of privacy rights.
HRW's statement said China's 'Police Cloud' was designed to track and predict the activities of activists, dissidents and ethnic minorities, and does not comply with international privacy standards.
"It is frightening that Chinese authorities are collecting and centralising ever more information about hundreds of millions of ordinary people, identifying persons who deviate from what they determine to be 'normal thought,' and then surveilling them," said Sophie Richardson, China director at HRW.
The Chinese government, according to HRW, has stored citizens' information for years, and is exploring new technologies to gather personal information more efficiently, and to share it across departments at both the national and local levels.
Various apps used to analyse texts, videos and security camera images in real time are aimed at suppressing crimes, but HRW said these methods also allow police to arbitrarily obtain information about ordinary people.
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