New facial recognition sunglasses already leading to arrests in China

        

The future of China's criminals isn't so bright thanks to police officers' new shades that some find frighteningly powerful.

Sunglasses with facial recognition capabilities that can identify potential suspects on the fly were heralded by state media in the People's Republic this week.

Reports said that seven people accused of crimes including human trafficking had already been nabbed with the new technology, which was put into practice at a train station in Zhengzhou.

The sunglasses are connected to a handheld database that allows pictures taken by the glasses to almost instantly find matches of those known to police.

China has also been pioneering the use of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras with facial recognition of its more than 1 billion citizens.

The sunglasses cameras given to officers on the ground are viewed as more attuned to catching people in busy locations where they have time to disappear into a crowd before police respond to alerts from a fixed camera.

"The potential to give individual police officers facial-recognition technology in sunglasses could eventually make China's surveillance state all the more ubiquitous," Amnesty International researcher William Nee told the Wall Street Journal.

Facial recognition technology mounted on vehicles is also being tested in other countries such as the United Kingdom, where police including those in London have trialed it at sporting events and street parades.

Advances have also made facial recognition technology cheaper and more available in recent years, leading to his use in devices such as the iPhone X.