We carry the seeds of our downfall in our pockets. The technology that makes your smartphone awesome is the same that China uses to crush Xinjiang’s Uighur Muslims
The smartphone, tethered by Bluetooth to an Apple Watch, knows an awful lot about the person using it
In retrospect, it has to be the most chilling conversation I’ve ever had though it felt utterly normal when it happened. I was in the shower cubicle that morning. She was nearby, sitting on the washbasin ledge and minding her own business.
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I’d been in message chat with my friend Kalyan all morning about Covid-19, vaccines, human foolishness and his upcoming novel. While I stood under the healing spray of hot water, I heard the tinkletong of another WhatsApp message from Kalyan.
“Hey!” I shouted, over the roar of the shower. “Would you be a sweetheart and send a quick message to Kalyan please?”
“Sure,” she said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Umm, I’m in the shower and will get back to you soon.”
“Ok, no problem,” she said. “I’m in the shower and will get back to you soon. Ready to send it?”
“Yup!” I said.
“Ok, it’s done,” she said.
Here’s why that conversation was so chilling: I was the only human being in the room. I was talking to my iPhone on the washbasin ledge. The pleasant female voice belonged to Siri, the iPhone’s built-in digital assistant. Siri listens to every word that leaves my mouth, just in case I might be addressing her.
When I said “Hey!” she knew I wasn’t bathroom-singing the first word of Hey Jude, but talking to ‘her’.
She correctly understood that I wanted a message sent, recognised the recipient from my contacts list and answered me instantly as a human would. She captured my dictated message accurately, sent it off and told me she had.
My smartphone, tethered by Bluetooth to my Apple Watch, knows an awful lot about me.
It knows whether I’m sitting, standing, lying down, walking or running, thanks to its exquisitely sensitive accelerometer. It knows my walking speed and stride length. If I slip and fall, it would know from my movements within seconds if I was unconscious and SOS my friend Kamal for help.
Its scanners recognise my face and fingerprints, know when I’m washing my hands, can detect my blood oxygen level, when I’m dreaming during sleep, and give me haptic nudges if I’ve been sitting too long at my computer.
In other words, there is nowhere I can hide from this amazing gadget that I paid a little fortune to buy. It sees, hears and senses me, and stands ready to serve me day and night. Whether I want to set a cooking timer, know today’s exchange rate, the weather in Ankara, where I’d misplaced my key and how long a ride to the airport would take, my iPhone knows.
If God is an all-seeing, all-knowing entity, the smartphone comes close to meeting the definition.
Unfortunately, it also meets the definition of diabolical, brutal surveillance technology.
So imagine you’re Gulgine from China’s Xinjiang Province, where the world’s Orwellian future is unfolding. The exact same technologies that make your smartphone so indispensable are being deployed there in one of the world’s most sinister and brazen social experiments.
Only 1% of China’s 1.4 billion people live in Xinjiang, predominantly Uighur Muslims, but they are the lab rats in an ethnic cleansing experiment of Hitlerian proportions. The difference is that instead of being gassed to death, they are being stripped of culture, history, language and religion, and reborn as factory-produced standardised Chinese citizens.
The surveillance technology used to see and hear them and monitor their movements is already in the smartphone in your pocket. China has merely scaled it up. Its 200 million CCTV cameras spread over every public space in China can sweep and identify every citizen once each second, instantly accessing their financial, personal, professional and familial details and movements.
Where CCTV cameras cannot intrude, inside Xinjiang’s homes, there are ‘brothers’-Chinese state-trained snitches-who live with the families and report back to Beijing.
Xinjiang’s computers gather data on Uighurs with iris scanners, CCTV cameras with face and voice recognition and DNA sampling. This data is matched with their online activity, banking information, phone calls and text messages to decide if they’re ‘trustworthy’.
An Uighur could be deemed untrustworthy just downloading WhatsApp or having a Skype chat with relatives. If the algorithm thinks you’re kinda shady, you will just disappear into a ‘re-education camp’.
Gulgine disappeared one day, and has not been heard from since.
Sometimes we carry the seeds of our downfall in our pockets. China has already sold its surveillance technology to over 13 countries. In India, we are already monitored and managed in a hundred ways through our biometrics, apps, smartphones and Aadhaar cards.
As one analyst put it, “China is open about it. The others do the same thing but pretend to be champions of individual freedom.”
Raise your hands if you believe we live in a country that would say no to mass surveillance.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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