NPR

Thanks To AI, A 3rd Person Is Arrested Following A Pop Superstar's Concert

The man was among some 20,000 people attending a Jacky Cheung concert when he was identified by facial recognition technology powered by artificial intelligence.
Chinese superstar Jacky Cheung performs onstage during his "A Classical Tour" concert at Hong Kong Coliseum on Dec. 4, 2016.

As people continue to feed more and more of their interior selves — our likes, dislikes, wants, needs, social cartographies — into digital networks that harvest and parse that information into profiles used to make money, a new frontier of monitoring that hones in on our physical features is ascendant.

In Jiaxing, China, on Sunday evening, a man — one of some 20,000 people that it was creating a facial database. "A few minutes after he passed through the security checkpoint, our system issued a warning that he was a wanted person," an official with the Nanhu District Public Security Bureau told the . The man, who authorities identified only by his surname, Yu, is accused of having stolen around $17,000 worth of potatoes in 2015.

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