China doesn’t want kids to play games at night, resorts to face scans
Back in 2019 Chinese government passed a motion to battle video games addiction in young people in the country. Gamers aged under 18 are effectively prohibited from playing online games between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.
And now, as if taken straight out of a Black Mirror episode, a new system called “Midnight Patrol” has been put into action to enforce the law on young smartphone gamers.
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According to Ars Technica, China’s biggest mobile game publisher Tencent has the "Midnight Patrol" watchdog feature added to over 60 of its China-specific smartphone games. If the kid tries to play his favorite game after the curfew hour, there will be a prompt followed by a face scan.
It’s not clear whether “Midnight Patrol” utilizes other Chinese public biometric scanning systems and also nobody knows what happens to the scanned faces of these kids. The intention behind this seems to be good but the execution is taken straight out of a dystopian movie.
What do you think about it? Would you let the government scan your child’s face?
And now, as if taken straight out of a Black Mirror episode, a new system called “Midnight Patrol” has been put into action to enforce the law on young smartphone gamers.
According to Ars Technica, China’s biggest mobile game publisher Tencent has the "Midnight Patrol" watchdog feature added to over 60 of its China-specific smartphone games. If the kid tries to play his favorite game after the curfew hour, there will be a prompt followed by a face scan.
The face scan is obviously there to determine if a kid is playing the game in question but it’s far from perfect. What about kids running to their sleeping parents to scan their faces? Maybe “Midnight Patrol” requires your eyes to be opened for the scan to be deemed successful?
It’s not clear whether “Midnight Patrol” utilizes other Chinese public biometric scanning systems and also nobody knows what happens to the scanned faces of these kids. The intention behind this seems to be good but the execution is taken straight out of a dystopian movie.
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