According to Yahoo News, the Chinese government is collecting “voice pattern” samples from individuals to establish a national voice biometric database intended to increase public security.
According to Yahoo News, the Chinese government is collecting “voice pattern” samples from individuals to establish a national voice biometric database intended to increase public security.
Image source: rt.com
Official tender documents and police reports suggest that police are collecting voice patterns together with other biometrics – fingerprints, palm prints, and profile photos, as well as urine and DNA samples – when they conduct “standardized” and “integrated” “information collection”.
Police officers can subject anyone suspected of “violating the law or committing crimes”, including misdemeanors, to this treatment. Government reports in the media claim that Automatic Speaker Recognition has been used to match voice patterns to solve cases involving telecommunications fraud, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and blackmail.
Police Caught Scammer by Recognizing Voice Patterns
A February 2017 report by the news website The Paper, described how Anhui police effectively stopped a telecommunications fraud and intercepted the scammer by using an Automatic Speaker Recognition system.
Image source: Google
A woman in Huainan, Anhui, unknowingly received a scammers call. The scam artist was instructing the woman step by step on how to transfer funds from her personal bank account to his. Luckly, the police were able to intercept the call using their voice recognition software. When the system identified the callers voice patterns. Authorities were alerted and immediately disconnected the line, cutting off the conversation from his intended victim.
Similar purchases for voice pattern collection systems were also made in 2016 by the police bureaus in Xinjiang. Police and media reports also indicate the voice pattern databases have been constructing in Guangdong province, Anqi county in Fujian province, Wuhan city in Hubei province, and Nanjing city in Jiangsu province.
The Tech Giant Who Behind The Curtain
Authorities are collaborating with iFlytek, a Chinese company that produces 80 percent of all speech recognition technology in the country.
Image source: Reuters, hrw.org
iFlytek has a range of commercial text-to-speech and speech recognition applications for mobile phones, including a voice assistance app for Android phones in China.
The company states it has 890 million users, which would provide a large speech data set that can be used to train and improve its speech recognition software for a range of purposes, potentially including surveillance.
Voice Patterns Database Works Efficiently
By 2015, police had collected 70,000 voice patterns in Anhui province, one of the main pilot provinces identified by the ministry for such collection.
National police databases have more than one billion faces and 40 million people’s DNA samples. This voice biometric data is linked in police databases to the person’s identification number, which in turn can then be linked to a person’s other biometric and personal information on file, including their ethnicity, home address, and even their hotel records.
Source：HiTouch
