of military leaders for more than 40 countries at the thomaston ad, based in germany, you're watching d. w. news from bell and up next film. take the look at the surveillance in china. if you're looking for more global headlines, as with our web site, that's d w dot com. and don't forget you can follow us on social media as well. i'm and you can mckinnon on behalf of the whole team. thanks so much for being with a we're interested in the global economy. our portfolio g w business beyond. here's a closer look at the project. our mission. to analyze who fight for market dominance? good stood with the w business beyond. ah.

here in this shanghai surveillance center, no resident goes unwatched. hundreds of millions of cameras are installed all over china. this is shipping the 18 that we have algorithms that automatically recognize certain behaviors. so if someone is wearing a mask, for example, we immediately detect this wrong doing with no one can escape the cameras gaze even when taking out the trash. technological advancements in china effect, germany to chinese corporations have long been amassing troves of use the data of the i don't have control over way my data cent, whether it's to the u. s. in china or ever ah,

modern technology has its advantages from cashless payments to internet equipped cause. we're heading full throttle into a high tech future. but at what cost? ah. the u family embraces all the latest tech, the world's evolving, and father chin way believes it's best to keep up. ha, i do when the chinese version of tick tock is a favorite source of entertainment for 10 year old man fe and her parents. julia. as long as you, we watch videos of friends that was just a friend's young daughter, for example, jose, a film cute videos of their children and upload them. it gives us things to talk

about tele, leroy mon fee is content using the tiny screen on her smart watch. many of her classmates have such devices rather than smartphones. she can use or watch to make phone calls and even purchases one door through. oh, does she oh do data when my parents aren't around and i can't remember the homework advantage. i can double check what was said in our class chat. i can also post what i do day to day in the chat and take pictures how she'll walk by that either. pion . shania rehak li pays year charlie on yet. what is your name? my name is goofy. like many other children in middle to upper class families, mun, fe takes private english lessons even before the cove at 19 pandemic. they were conducted online. meanwhile, mother sent young takes care of the weekend shopping and the electricity bill all

on her smartphone. the family lives in hung joe ah, the city has grown rapidly into a high tech metropolis. it's now home to 10000000 people. the families car is also equipped with the latest technology. they drive an electric vehicle from chinese manufacturer, neo it to has internet pay no me for the last song. ah, the family passes by countless cameras on their drive through the city. does that ever make each way uneasy? not on the hill visible to the water and shrink. i'm now on the contrary to that,

how i feel a sense of security. think it's a problem, isn't that data exists? the question is what's done with it. i also had, since the government is very strict with our data, as far as i know, i trust them and how you soon, bottom couple hours drive away is shanghai home to 24000000 residents. each city district has a data hub where all the information is collected. authorities call it the brain. foreign media are seldom allowed access. employees in this district alone have access to 290000 cameras. and in some cases they can control them directly. algorithms help stuff sort through the material. this monitor maps all construction sites and the red dots flag irregularities in one instance.

the a i detect the construction work and not wearing a safety helmet. shang done, done co develop the system it took less than a year to get the 1st version up and running. now she can monitor every president from this office and pay more than to go found it and good out. shooting me a little funny. she says she, we've met the residential buildings on the district, attention that which ones are occupied last year, where there are vacancies, your content, where elderly people are living alone, loads honey, where care or health is needed her. and it's all stored in our system and can be called up in real time, the mentality to buy things in it all, dead to go with some passion to acacia dodge ram. even those who do not dispose of

their trash properly are recorded. residents who aren't following the rules are captured on camera from 3 different angles. the so called brain act swiftly, whether it's an illegally parked call, or unsolicited advertising offenses can be handled by patrol officers who are connected to the control center via a mobile app. just an example quarter, so a 120 minutes into fatty him. and as soon as the squads and volunteers in residential districts, hackers bought an issue that they can report it and upload footage on whether they take a photo report the issue. and then our system automatically decides which department to forward the matter to go cheaper and to go san antonio and i go pull money to each other, go cheerleader ah, the brain and shanghai is pu dung district is just one component to the overarching

surveillance plan. the chinese government is pushing across the country. the goal is to have complete coverage and major public places such as train stations, st intersections and parks. i, china, state media, boasts that police can identify every single person on the street in just one second. in berlin, research him a hi goulburg is keeping a close eye on china's rapidly growing security apparatus. all dark herself cannot enter china anymore because her research is a thorn in the side of authorities there. she knows all about surveillance centers like the one in shanghai. for years she's collected chinese data that's available

online, for instance, from public tenders round, middle familiar and we've downloaded several 1000000 datasets. some have very detail dependencies where really different surveillance schemes are explained in the road that is high actually advantage. for instance, what type of camera to install over which building entrance the datasets also make clear why chinese authorities are monitoring their citizens. and the 1st place that comes from not obviously doesn't wanna mention a mental issue into it's beautifully described that essentially people and human interaction are the source of any social conflict. and social conflict is ultimately what could cause difficulties for the government if they can't provide social stability. that's all to say if you can monitor human activity with cameras with surveillance, then you can also promptly detect and diffused any conflict and essentially have

peace again. in shanghai, there's big money in data collection. that's why huge corporations have set up shop in china like the tech company, 10 cent. the alibaba group and white dance which markets itself as cosmopolitan in promo videos. as the parent company of tick tock by dance is the world's most valuable start up with tick tock was the most downloaded app of 2020. the app has close to $700000000.00 active uses every month and is especially popular among young people across the world. ah, that includes germany too, of course, at the campus of the rural university bull home, a north wind, westphalia, flint is an avid biker, and his girlfriend, jill films put tick tock. okay. yep. got it. the student and her

boyfriend love the social networking platform from china with guzman. okay. those are the taxes. okay. i think it's fine. okay. yet on. okay, next. okay. and on one thing they both love about tick tock is anyone can get famous in just 2nd. launch publish. what you know, ball rolling down in with my favorite part is that you don't have to do anything extraordinary. you just upload a video, and with luck you'll instantly have a 1000 like so i told him like what you know mo roland down in a mental 3 with her. that's awesome. yeah, very cool. all our financials,

friends are now on tick tock as well. the couples spends a lot of time on the i as a says and fastened. well, it's a bit embarrassing, and i don't want to admit how fast the time flies by. i have the feeling. you don't just look at one or 2 videos, you endlessly scroll through my head with the secret to keep user. scrolling the algorithm, it tracks which videos jill and fin like and keeps offering me ones, which they then might even more as their tick tock feeds become increasingly tailored to their specific tastes. the app is gathering troves of data in the background. but what exactly is it learning? what does tick tock know about the couple? the 2 are curious. we ask researchers at roo universities institute for i t security to take a closer look at the app and shed some light on what kind of data tick talks

collecting liberty talk with you as often india implement, so tick tock installed on my phone and is on all the, the to can now see in real time what data is being transmitted avenue of this information is always transmitted. so while catchy tunes play in the foreground, the network scans through personal data and the background as us get it to the approximate location the, your cell phone model from. and of course, every single, like and comment or them from on a few live i today one soon and as it generated i, i found it fascinating to see it all in such depth. and i've never seen it before it talk with take talk. i found it interesting and surprising, especially the fact that you can see how long i've watched which video or when i skip over it, like, i was shocked to see it laid out like that. but i think with time,

i'll forget about that too and just use tick tock like i normally do, picked up in a v. m. i. with every scrap of data take talks, algorithm as shopping and say the personalized recommendations get better. tick tock, tick, tock has very good mechanisms in the background to suggest the exact content i like when they're by maximizing the likelihood that i'll stay on the platform longer. that's where they're better than facebook and instagram. and that's exactly what makes this company so valuable of that. on the other hand, up on a platform like this can also filter out certain content to share. so a certain political content or topics aren't desired when they're just not shown to other users and good site. tick tock is time and again accused of pushing funny videos and suppressing disagreeable content. things videos that are critical of china don't stand a chance to move in case in point. the gentleman square massacre clips of the deadly 1989 protests can be found here and there. but often with very

few likes it's called shadow banning content is not deleted. but it's shown so rarely that it's essentially made invisible. tick tock declined our request for an interview on this topic, but the company's berlin office told us their content moderation is not influenced by any government, including china's despite assertions, otherwise expert. my callback says chinese companies may be private on paper, but the state reserves the right to intervene at any time. the host leslie can have caused this, ultimately the possibility to have greater control over these products. even if the content isn't overtly censored, it can be indirectly censored through what's pushed out. what becomes popular versus what's made to disappear. you done efficiently. in beijing,

artist dung. e fung knows what it's like for something to disappear at the hands of chinese senses. because he works on politically sensitive topics. he's been questioned several times by police in a performance last year he explored the question, is that even possible to walk down a beijing street any more without being captured on camera, where she googled us? oh, by me go, sam po, she paiute up here. now she does ha. i photographed each surveillance camera and told that they researched the model out of a marked down the technical details of such as the focal length and the angle. behold at hunter. sure. she says, for each camera identified the brand, the model that she saw i had precise information and knew the exact area recovered . angela, you go potty ambo, you go full phone. he filmed

a group of volunteers walking along a stretch in the shadow of beijing's cameras. each step was choreographed the group took over 2 hours to walk about one kilometer. the videos have since been censored by the authorities and can only be viewed outside mainland china. the artist is also no longer permitted to distribute the material. so the bottom or can is a song tomorrow, his anderson is as always invoke his niece. about course i'm disappointed. as an artist, you create something, you invest, work ideas and thoughts are you, i try to express yourself, answer your either. you nurture it, like you do a child win, and then you can make your own work known or show it to anyone can. but of course it's frustrating at okay to shop his latest

protect also grapples with privacy concerns. and his critique extends beyond china . in his exhibition, he publishes a provocative fact sheet listing his own personal information in the wake of the cove. at 19 pandemic data collection has ramped up even more in china. health authorities use apps to try to identify infected individuals. potential contacts. dung must scan a q r code with an up before entering the gallery district. his temperature is also taken apart, tacitly touching needed. the app looks your health status, ethan, and contract your journey after the skull. it shows you if everything is okay when

it was hitting the down, we didn't, you know, if he had been in the same place as some one infected with a corona virus, he would have been denied entry whenever curve at 19 is again detected in the country the app becomes everyone's ticket to public life, to shop at a grocery store, to eat at a restaurant even to get a taxi back in, bo, whom researchers at real university, are comparing the chinese health app to germany's corona virus, up the german version at his to the country is notoriously strict data protection laws the up my only communicate anonymously with other mobile devices in the immediate vicinity hillis with, nor by which i pronounced as i seem against that farmer. that means the data is processed locally on my phone. but if the chinese app works completely differently, us analyzing the app proofs complicated,

the data is encrypted, but the researchers can see that data is being collected and transmitted at every check in location. this is as, as when some of this information that i'm at a certain place at a certain time, but that is then presumably transmitted to a central place. and that's where the actual analysis is done. the checking in itself is, of course problematic from a privacy perspective. because you'd then have very detail tracking equals poor feel hot. china has completely de emphasized privacy and freedom of movement during the pandemic. in the brain of shanghai is put dung district. every suspected coven 19 case is monitored. mm hm. oh mm. so i may officially think that a colon cancer as it is chicago. we installed a network of sensors in front of the apartment life when the door sensor registers

. people leaving the apartment in violation of the rules were alerted. district staff in the health department of an informed one and can respond quickly at the fan. what's technologically possible is carried out with little regard for people's privacy, criticism, or resistance among the population is virtually non existent. even the usually critical artist dung thinks collecting health data amid the pandemic is useful. when does your please going? it's an ethical tradeoff. thought is, is human life or privacy more important going thought by, that's the choice the technology presents us. oh, this guy, i think everyone makes the decision that life is more import.