You wake up and stare at the phone screen to unlock it. You peer into a camera to exit your apartment complex, to clock in at work, and to pay for lunch at the convenience store. On the subway, the faces of commuters are displayed—along with their body temperatures—at the security checkpoint. Later, on the news, you see that two fugitives have been arrested after their faces were scanned by security cameras in a crowd at a concert.

This is not an imagined future, but a reality many cities across China are hoping to achieve as governments and companies pour money into facial recognition technology. But though facial recognition cameras have quietly become pervasive, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, news of data leaks and scams have fueled debates around the safety of user information, citizens’ rights to privacy, and the opaque ways in which government and companies are using sensitive biometric data.

Facial recognition has become widespread in the last two or three years in China as the AI technology behind it has improved. Now, China is home to some of the world’s largest facial recognition companies. Hangzhou’s Hikvision, for example, is the world’s largest producer of surveillance cameras.

Facial recognition systems use “deep learning” algorithms to identify a person by analyzing images and measuring the contours of their face in minute detail, from the distance between their ears to the size of their nostrils, in order to find a match in a database of images.

The Chinese facial recognition market could exceed 5 billion RMB by 2021, with the vast majority of this demand driven by law enforcement and public security. Around 350 million surveillance cameras monitored China’s streets in 2018, according to research by American-British firm IHS Markit, and Chinese authorities had previously suggested that number would increase to 626 million by 2020. Eight of the ten most surveilled cities in the world, as measured by the number of security cameras per person, are in China.

Not all of these cameras have facial recognition capabilities, but an increasing number do. Even those that don’t can capture images that can be used to build a database for facial recognition technology. The “Sharp Eyes” program launched in 2015 by the National Development and Reform Commission, which invests billions of RMB into AI technologies to digitize surveillance and improve intelligence collection, has pushed facial recognition to the forefront of law enforcement.