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Facial recognition
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Facial recognition toilet paper dispensers in China put on hold as privacy concerns grow

  • Toilet paper dispensers equipped with facial recognition put on hold in China’s Dongguan city after citizens raise concerns
  • Facial recognition leaks are rampant in the country, and authorities are tightening regulations

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A man uses an automatic toilet paper dispenser that uses facial recognition technology at a public toilet at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing on March 21, 2017. Photo: AFP
Tracy Qu
Mounting concerns over privacy have pushed Chinese authorities to pause the use of facial recognition technology in a public loo.

The facial recognition system in a public toilet in Guangdong province’s Dongguan city was used to recognise individuals and limit the amount of toilet paper each could take within a certain amount of time, according to a post on the official Weibo account of the city’s Urban Management And Law Enforcement Bureau. Photos of users were deleted after some time and the system was not connected to a network, according to the post, which said that the system was suspended after some citizens raised concerns.

A Weibo topic page about using facial recognition to access toilet paper was viewed more than 100 million times by noon on Monday. “I think they can stop offering free toilet paper, or charge a fee. Why would they need facial recognition to [stop toilet paper theft]?” one user on microblogging site Weibo wrote.

A public restroom at the Temple of Heaven Park in Beijing was the first to use facial recognition to dispense toilet paper in 2017, and similar systems have since been introduced in several other Chinese cities. 

More than 700 cities in China have proposed or are in the process of building smart infrastructure, according to a report by the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute last year, and Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are among the cities that have announced initiatives specifically to use smart technologies in public toilets.

However, facial recognition data leaks are rampant in China: images of faces, national ID numbers and phone numbers have repeatedly been found for sale online at alarmingly low prices – with state-run news agency Xinhua reporting in July that some online vendors were selling facial data for just 0.5 yuan (7 US cents) per face.
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