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China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

techcrunch.com

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Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#101

Post by partiallypro »

coliveira wrote: post #21

This is not new, and is not unique to China. Any country with intelligence units, like the US, is using data mining to identify and control their citizens. It has become fashionable lately to imply that China is the only country doing these things, or somehow doing it in larger scale. Has everyone forgotten what Snowden revealed?

Don't even pretend that the US and the China use this tech the same way. The US might have a few bad apples in intelligence using data mining for bad things and there have been some questionable data being mined; but suppression of people isn't happening from it. China is using this tracking to actively suppress their people and view that do not align with the state.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#102

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

nabla9 wrote: post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

Arguably, there are enough people walking around with stones in their shoes that altering your movement with that method would be masking enough - until they're able to simulate how you're normal gait would change with x sized stone at whatever location in your shoe..

Alternatively, I've heard (don't have the source handy) that they're looking at other stuff that the stone in shoe might not change such as overall height and knee to leg to hip to foot stature and angular momentum ratios. Who knows?

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#105

Post by woolvalley »

nabla9 wrote: post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

I think the vast noise of people sprain their ankles, the people who did get a pebble in their shoe and the old people who decided to not put on their knee brace for that quick errand and similar that would result in way too many false positives to mark them all persons of interest.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#106

Post by 80mph »

Anyone who's heavily near-sighted knows this technique. In college, my dorm bathroom was quite a distance from my room. At night, I would remove my contact lenses, and upon returning I would always identify certain people by their style of walking, or their posture.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#107

Post by yourbandsucks »

ctoth wrote: post #48
coliveira wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but it looks like China is just playing catch up on this. The US intelligence already has information on pretty much every American, their social networks, phone calls, consumer habits, etc. And through Facebook, Google and others, they also have information about mosts people around the world. Even if China is able to track everyone inside Chine they're still at a disadvantage compared to the US covert operat…

The whataboutism is strong with this one. Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful. Or abused. But useful.

They're not making a value statement, it's a capabilities statement.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#108

Post by cxseven »

diydsp wrote: post #94
jandrese wrote: post #12

I'm curious what the false positive rate is on this technology. It seems like a very noisy source to do correlations from.

I'm about to walk out the door so I can't look up papers, but I'm going to guess that it's based as much on dynamics as actual proportions of limbs. I would estimate the number of features to be on the scale of 2000-2010 era facial recognition. Dynamics would increase the number of dimensions, making it possible to separate two people with nearly identical features. However, I do agree that inferring the proportions…

If they blanket an area with cameras, as China does, they can use multiple vantage points to get more accurate measurements and, when a positive ID is made, they can persistently track that person crossing from one field of view to another.

I think the main advantage of gait analysis (or limb proportion measurement) is that it will encourage a more efficient, decentralized computation that first distills the observed data into a fingerprint that can be more easily transmitted over a wire to a massive database for matching, rather than the alternatives of either replicating that database or transmitting raw, high-bandwidth data.

Besides limb measurements, they could also use last known location, residence, and vehicle ownership information to increase the certainty of loose matches.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#109

Post by superfrank »

cooperellis wrote: post #103

UK has been doing this for decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8

So have casinos.

I was really into the idea of card counting when I was in high school (over 10 years ago) and remember coming across multiple sources that claimed casinos did this as part of their arsenal to detect people who've been blackballed.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#110

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

eganist wrote: post #13

Mitigation strategies discussed in an unrelated (but relevant) conversation between WIRED and Jonna Mendez - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8&t=278 (if you're not auto-jumped, find 4:38 in the video)

A url with &t= pretty much always auto-jumps.
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