FILE - In this Aug. 31, 2018, file photo, a child and a woman wait outside a school entrance mounted with surveillance cameras and barricades with multiple layers of barbed wire in Peyzawat, western China's Xinjiang region. The Chinese database Victor Gevers found online was not just a collection of old personal details. The discovery by Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher who revealed it on Twitter last week, has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of Xinjiang, a remote region home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. The area has been blanketed with police checkpoints and security cameras that apparently are doing more than just recording what happens. The database Gevers found appears to have been recording people’s movements tracked by facial recognition technology, he said, logging more than 6.7 million coordinates in a span of 24 hours. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
BEIJING: The Chinese database Victor Gevers found online was not just a collection of old personal details.
It was a compilation of real-time data on more than 2.5 million people in western China, updated constantly with GPS coordinates of their precise whereabouts. Alongside their names, birthdates and places of employment, there were notes on the places that they had most recently visited – mosque, hotel, restaurant.
