camera behind lcd screen made in china

There"s not much in the way of independent footage of this phone, but YouTuber AmazTech has thoughtfully pointed a flashlight at the display, which reveals the camera.

ZTE has officially announced the world"s first commercial phone with a behind-the-screen camera: the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Shrinking phone bezels have made locating the front camera a major design point of phones for the past few years. We"ve seen big camera notches, small camera notches,round camera cutouts, and pop-up cameras. Rather than any of those compromises, the under-display camera lets you just put the camera under the display, and by peering through the pixels, you can still take a picture. It"s the holy grail of front-camera design.

As we"ve seen in explainers from Xiaomi, these under-display cameras work by thinning out the pixels above the display, either by reducing the number of pixels or by making the pixels smaller, which allows more light to reach the camera. In the area above the camera, manufacturers will have to strike a balance between a denser display with lower-quality camera results or better camera output in exchange for an uglier above-the-camera display.

ZTE"s official renders of the device claim the camera is completely invisible, which can"t be right. It"s standard practice to not make any attempt at a realistic-looking pixel display in these renders, but in this case, that"s a big deal, since the display should look slightly darker above the camera. With COVID cutting down everyone"s ability to travel, there isn"t much in the way of live footage of the phone, either. ZTE posted an official live video to Weibo that really goes out of its way to never linger on a close-up shot of the camera, which is highly suspicious given the camera is the phone"s only headline feature. The best footage we can find right now is a YouTube unboxing from AmazTech, which at least takes the time to scrutinize the sensor location. AmazTech doesn"t have the sharpest video quality on Earth, but it doesn"t seem like ZTE has a lot to hide: the camera is still hard to spot. I would still like a better look at the screen, particularly with lower brightness levels, but so far it looks amazing. Advertisement

Covering the fancy new camera tech is a 6.92-inch 2460×1080 OLED display. The base model phone has a Snapdragon 765G SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4220mAh battery, and a bunch of other unremarkable specs. ZTE lists Chinese prices starting at ¥2198 ($321). Huawei gets all of the "banned in the USA" headlines, but ZTE isn"t welcome in the United States either. That means you shouldn"t expect much in the way of distribution.

Although Chinese manufacturers usually get the jump on new technology like this, everyone picks from the same parts bin. So you can expect to see under-display cameras from most major Android manufacturers in the next year or two. This also means we"re rocketing toward the age of the completely invisible camera, a privacy-nightmare world where any device with a screen could secretly be recording your every movement. We"ve already run into devices that can discretely include microphones, and last year Google got into hot water for shipping a device with an undisclosed microphone. Now we get to do this with cameras! Welcome to the future, I guess.

For decades, we’ve lived with an inconvenient technological truth: Cameras and other sensors cannot occupy the same space as our screens. It’s why, increasingly, smartphones rely on the dreaded “notch” as a way of maximizing screen-to-body ratios while preserving the front-facing camera and other sensors.

Some phone makers, from Oppo to OnePlus, get around this problem by using motorized pop-up cameras, while others have resorted to punching holes in displays to provide the camera with its own peephole. It’s also why even the latest high-end laptops still have pronounced bezels around their displays. The webcam needs a home and it seems no one is willing to live with a notch or hole-punch on a computer.

But it turns out that cameras and screens aren’t quite as incompatible as they seem. Thanks to improvements in manufacturing techniques, these two adversaries are about to end their long-standing territorial dispute. This isn’t a far-flung prediction; it’s happening right now.

Complaining about a phone notch, hole-punch or a large screen bezel is the very definition of a first-world problem. And judging from Apple’s stellar sales numbers, none of these side effects of forward-facing cameras are dealbreakers for buyers.

First, it lets you make phones that have true edge-to-edge screens. Videos and photos look better, and app developers can make use of every square millimeter for their designs — all while keeping the phone’s body as small as possible.

Second, from a design and manufacturing point of view, if cameras and sensors can be placed anywhere, with fewer restrictions on their size and visibility, it redraws the map for phone design. Bigger batteries, thinner phones, more sensors, and much better cameras are all potential upsides.

Cameras placed in bezels or notches create the now all-too-familiar, awkward downward gaze that happens during video calls. “Most of the time, you’re not actually looking at each other when you’re talking over video chat,” Michael Helander, CEO at Toronto-based OTI Lumionics told Digital Trends. “The current placement of videoconferencing cameras in all of these devices is really suboptimal.”

Helander has probably thought about this problem more than most. His company creates specialty materials that enable what was once impossible — making displays transparent enough that you can place a camera behind them.

Once a camera is sitting behind the display, it will finally make our video interactions look and feel like real, in-person interactions — a game changer that couldn’t come at a better time in our COVID-restricted world.

Screen technology is dominated by two kinds of displays. The most common are liquid crystal displays (LCD), which include LED TVs and QLED TVs. The second, organic light-emitting diode (OLED), dominates smartphones and tablets, and is growing in use in laptops and even desktop monitors

LCDs are actually transparent when not in use — that’s why you see a gray background on a calculator screen wherever the black digit segments aren’t active. But taking advantage of this transparency to take a photo poses big technical hurdles, especially once you factor in the need for a backlight.

One solution favored by Xiaomi and Oppo in their UDC prototypes is to rely on an OLED pixel’s inherent transparency. When an OLED pixel isn’t being used to emit light, it lets light in. So you can place a camera behind an OLED display and it will be able to gather enough light to capture images. But there’s a catch: You still need to place the camera at the top or bottom of the screen, because when the camera is active, the OLED pixels above it must be shut off, which creates a temporary black area on the screen. That approach is a solution to the notch and hole-punch problem, but it does nothing to solve the downward gaze issue.

The first commercially available phone with an under-display camera — the ZTE Axon 20 5G — uses this technique, but it also suffers from a less-than-ideal compromise. Modern smartphones have incredibly densely packed pixels. The iPhone 12 Pro has a 460ppi (pixels per inch) display, which means that there are more than 200,000 pixels in one square inch. Sony’s Xperia XZ Premium had a whopping 807ppi screen (more than 650,000 pixels per square inch).

Punching holes in between those pixels, even with a laser, is so tricky that ZTE had to remove some pixels from the area above the camera to buy some extra room. The result is a noticeably lower-resolution square on the screen.

A lower-resolution section of the screen might not bother you when it’s near the top, in an area that’s used mostly for inconsequential information. But few people would accept such an obvious reduction of resolution in the center of their phone’s display, which is what we would need to counteract the downward-gaze problem.

Helander claims the self-assembly process works on any screen size, and lets manufacturers decide how many openings are needed — from just one to 1 billion.

As exciting as it is to think that we’ll soon be able to have much more natural video calls, placing a camera under a display puts an even bigger onus on manufacturers to provide trustworthy privacy measures.

We’ll need some kind of reliable indicator of when the camera is active and an equally reliable way of disabling it. Because it’s under the screen, there’s no way to physically block the lens without blocking content on the screen as well.

Apple recently updated iOS to show a small green dot near the notch when its forward-facing camera is in use, and an orange dot to show when the mic is active. That’s a good way to inform us of what’s going on, but we need something more.

Smart speakers like the Google Nest mini ship with physical switches that can be used to disable the microphones. Assuming that there’s no way to remotely overcome the switch’s position, it provides a very good level of trust. A similar mechanism on TVs, monitors, and laptops should come standard once cameras become invisible.

OTI Lumionics already has agreements in place with several Chinese smartphone manufacturers, but due to confidentiality restrictions, these companies can’t be named just yet. “Many of them have prototype phones that have been built and everything looks great,” Helander notes, “but none of them want to disclose anything publicly until they’re ready for their actual official product announcements.” He’s confident that we’ll see these new under-display camera models sometime in 2021, although they may remain a Chinese market exclusive until 2022.

But this Oppo solution means you don"t need notches, holes or mechanical stowaway cameras. Instead, the camera lens sits under the screen. It hides completely when you"re watching videos or doing anything else with the phone, but the camera lens will appear when you need it.

"It utilizes a customized camera module, an enhanced translucent panel material combined with advanced processing algorithms to take vivid pictures without a notch or motorized camera," Oppo said in a tweet. In a video demo from Oppo, you can see that the area around where the camera appears becomes completely black. This likely also helps prevent any outside light from ruining a picture.

Oppo said this is just a taste of its technology, and didn"t say when it might be available in a phone you can buy. But this is probably how most front-facing cameras will work in the future.

The police who work inside are looking elsewhere. They spend their days poring over computer screens, watching footage that comes in from 4,300 cameras across the country.

The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centers in Ecuador that employ more than 3,000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders. If they spy something, they zoom in.

Ecuador’s system, which was installed beginning in 2011, is a basic version of a program of computerized controls that Beijing has spent billions to build out over a decade of technological progress. According to Ecuador’s government, these cameras feed footage to the police for manual review.

In Ecuador, the cameras that are part of ECU-911 hang from poles and rooftops, from the Galápagos Islands to the Amazonian jungle. The system lets the authorities track phones and may soon get facial-recognition capabilities. Recordings allow the police to review and reconstruct past incidents.

The irony is that ECU-911 has not been effective at stopping crime, many Ecuadoreans said, though the system’s installation paralleled a period of falling crime rates. Ecuadoreans cite muggings and attacks that happened in front of the cameras without police response. Still, the police have built public support, partly by releasing clips on Twitter and television of thieves and muggers caught on camera.

Left to choose between privacy and safety, many Ecuadoreans opt for the unblinking gaze of the electronic eyes. With the mass surveillance genie out of the bottle, community leaders have called for cameras to help secure their neighborhoods, even when their own experiences are that the devices do not work well. Concerns about the long-term political implications trail behind the pressing realities of violence and drugs.

Before those Games, a delegation from Ecuador visited Beijing and toured the Chinese capital’s surveillance system. At the time, Beijing was pulling footage from 300,000 cameras to keep tabs on 17 million people. The Ecuadoreans left impressed.

By February 2011, with guarantees of state funding from the attachés, Ecuador signed a deal with no public bidding process. The country got a Chinese-designed surveillance system financed by Chinese loans. In exchange, Ecuador provided one of its main exports, oil. The money for the cameras and computing flowed straight to C.E.I.E.C. and Huawei.

Cameras were hung anywhere that provided a good view. Operation centers were set up. Top Ecuadorean officials traveled to China for training, and Chinese engineers visited to teach their Ecuadorean counterparts how to work the system.

The activity attracted attention from Ecuador’s neighbors. Venezuelan officials came to see the system, according to a 2013 account from an Ecuadorean official working on the project. In an effort led by the onetime head of intelligence for Hugo Chávez, Venezuela then sprang for a larger version of the system, with a goal of adding 30,000cameras. Bolivia followed.

Beijing’s ambitions go much further than the abilities those countries bought. Today, the police across China gather material from tens of millions of cameras, and billions of records of travel, internet use and business activities, to keep tabs on citizens. The national watch list of would-be criminals and potential political agitators includes 20 million to 30 million people — more than Ecuador’s population of 16 million.

Chinese start-ups, backed in part by American investment, are competing to build methods for automated policing. They create algorithms that look for suspicious patterns in social media use and computer-vision software to track minorities and petitioners across cities. The spending spree has driven down prices for all types of policing gadgets, as varied as identity-card checkers and high-resolution security cameras.

A seasoned intelligence officer, Mr. Pazmiño, 59, said even he was surprised when, in 2013, a video camera that was part of ECU-911 was installed directly outside his house. It hung from a pole on a traffic divider in the middle of the street, with a full view through a window into his second-story apartment.

Mr. Pazmiño said that after the camera went in, surveillance teams following him backed off. The camera otherwise made no real sense where it was. Mr. Pazmiño lives in a relatively safe neighborhood, and no other ECU-911 cameras were installed nearby. It was a move out of the police playbook in China, where cameras are positioned outside the doors of high-profile activists.

A visit to Senain’s headquarters confirmed Mr. Pazmiño’s suspicion. On a wall of screens that served as a sort of agency control room, Times reporters recognized footage from the ECU-911 system.

The crime has not subsided even though ECU-911 cameras arrived at the base of the hill several years ago. Ms. Rueda gestured to a pedestrian bridge there, where one man had grabbed her and threatened her with a knife while another had taken her money. The 2014 mugging happened directly beneath a police camera. No help came.

Ms. Rueda’s experience encapsulates the complex relationship many Ecuadoreans have with the cameras. While the authorities said the cameras had reduced crime, anecdotes of its dysfunction abound.

The odds are against Ecuador’s police force. Quito has more than 800 cameras. But during a Times visit, 30 police officers were on duty to check the footage. In their gray building atop the hill, officers spend a few minutes looking at footage from one camera and then switch. Preventing crime is only part of the job. In a control room, dispatchers supported responses to emergency calls.

Mr. Robayo argued that ECU-911 had been responsible for a major drop in murders and an almost 13 percent drop in crime in 2018 from the previous year. The mere existence of a camera can also have a profound effect, he said.

Many Ecuadoreans agree. Despite Ms. Rueda’s mugging, she has called for the installation of more cameras in El Tejar. The best way to fix the neighborhood’s crime problems is to fix the surveillance system, she said.

Visionox has announced that it can bring a certain amount of speculation as to the future of smartphone technology to fruition soon. This may be done through this company"s new InV See product, a type of display panel in which 1 dedicated square of pixels can become transparent. This may deliver a next-gen spec on perhaps every OEM"s wish-list: the under-display selfie camera.

This technology may directly supplant the current trend for punch-hole selfie cameras, in which a circle of display material is carefully cut away in order to allow a front-facing sensor (or sensors) to be placed directly within the resulting panel. Visionox InV See, on the other hand, is reportedly based on specially-selected screen material of enhanced transparency.

The company has allegedly stated that it incorporates new organic and inorganic display-layers with this property. In fact, every layer of a given InV See screen may have been geared toward this function, its metallic base-layer included. The manufacturer has noted that this promotes conductivity in that part of the panel directly above the camera.

Visionox has done all this to promote the basic mechanism behind the ability to conceal the camera, which is to turn the overlying pixels in question "clear" in response to specific electrical changes. To this end, the panel specialists have also created an industry-first drive circuit and pixel-structure design. This may manage interference from the pixel drive circuit on the camera and promote the function of the area to become transparent.

Despite all this, Visionox did not mention when its new InV See panels will be available for supply to these customers. This leaves us to speculate as to which current phone will have a successor with an under-display camera.

"Do you want a sneak peek at the future?" the tweet says. "Here you go ... introducing you to Under-Display Camera technology!"Do you want a sneak peek at the future? Here you go...introducing you to Under-Display Camera technology!#Xiaomi #InnovationForEveryone pic.twitter.com/d2HL6FHkh1— Xiaomi #5GIsHere (@Xiaomi) June 3, 2019

Xiaomi SVP Wang Xiang tweeted more detail on the under-display camera technology, calling it "the ultimate solution for a Full Screen Display coexisting with a front camera." Recently, Vivo revealed a concept phone called the

"Xiaomi is currently exploring the possibility of hiding the front-facing camera under the display," his tweet reveals. "When the selfie camera is activated, the display area over the camera lens becomes transparent in an instant, allowing light to enter."

"The transparent display doubles as the camera lens," Xiaomi explained. "By allowing more light into the lens, the display-embedded camera combo is able to produce perfect selfies, clear and crisper than the pinhole camera solution when the camera is activated."Xiaomi"s Under-Display Camera Technology could be the ultimate solution for a Full Screen Display coexisting with a front camera! RT if you love it. #InnovationForEveryone pic.twitter.com/8e7EdEBn8J— Wang Xiang (@XiangW_) June 3, 2019

The morning after Ian Lahiffe returned to Beijing, he found a surveillance camera being mounted on the wall outside his apartment door. Its lens was pointing right at him.

“(Having a camera outside your door is) an incredible erosion of privacy,” said Lahiffe. “It just seems to be a massive data grab. And I don’t know how much of it is actually legal.”

Although there is no official announcement stating that cameras must be fixed outside the homes of people under quarantine, it has been happening in some cities across China since at least February, according to three people who recounted their experience with the cameras to CNN, as well as social media posts and government statements.

China currently has no specific national law to regulate the use of surveillance cameras, but the devices are already a regular part of public life: they’re often there watching when people cross the street, enter a shopping mall, dine in a restaurant, board a bus or even sit in a school classroom.

More than 20 million cameras had been installed across China as of 2017, according tostate broadcaster CCTV. But other sources suggest a much higher number. According to a report from IHS Markit Technology, now a part of Informa Tech, China had 349 million surveillance cameras installed as of 2018, nearly five times the number of cameras in the United States.

China also has eight of the world’s 10 most surveilled cities based on the number of cameras per 1,000 people, according to UK-based technology research firm Comparitech.

But now the pandemic has brought surveillance cameras closer to people’s private lives: from public spaces in the city right to the front doors of their homes — and in some rare cases, surveillance cameras inside their apartments.

China is already using a digital “health code” system to control people’s movements and decide who should go into quarantine. To enforce home quarantine, local authorities have again resorted to technology — and have been open about the use of surveillance cameras.

A sub-district office of the government in Nanjing, in eastern Jiangsu province, said it had installed cameras outside the doors of people under self-quarantine to monitor them 24 hours a day — a move that “helped save personnel expenditures and increased work efficiency,” according to its February 16 post on Weibo, China’s twitter-like platform.

In Hebei province, the Wuchongan county government in the city of Qianan also said it was using surveillance cameras to monitor residents quarantined at home, according to a statement on its website. In the city of Changchun in northeastern Jilin province, the quarantine cameras in Chaoyang district are powered with artificial intelligence to detect human shapes, the district government saidon its website.

In the eastern city of Hangzhou, China Unicom, a state-owned telecom operator, helped the local governments install 238 cameras to monitor home-quarantined residents as of February 8, the company said in a Weibo post.

On Weibo, some people posted photos of cameras they said were newly put up outside their doors, as they went into home quarantine in Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Changzhou, among other cities.

Some appeared to accept the surveillance, although it remains unclear how much criticism against the measure is tolerated on the country’s closely monitored and censored internet. A Weibo user, who went into home quarantine after returning to Beijing from Hubei province, said she was told in advance by her neighborhood committee that a camera and an alarm would be installed on her front door. “(I) fully respect and understand the arrangement,” she wrote.

Another Beijing resident said he did not think the camera was necessary, “but since it is a standard requirement, (I’m) happy to accept it,” wrote a person who identified himself as Tian Zengjun, a lawyer in Beijing.

Others, worried about the virus’ spread in their communities, called for local authorities to install surveillance cameras to ensure people obey quarantine rules.

William Zhou, a public servant, returned to the city of Changzhou, in eastern Jiangsu province, from his native Anhui province in late February. The next day, he said a community worker and a police officer came to his apartment and set up a camera pointing at his front door – from a cabinet wall inside his home.

Zhou said he did not like the idea. He asked the community worker what the camera would record and the community worker showed him the footage on his smartphone.

“I was standing in my living room and the camera captured me clearly in its frame,” said Zhou, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of repercussions.

Zhou was furious. He asked why the camera couldn’t be placed outside instead, but the police officer told him it might get vandalized. In the end, he said the camera stayed on the cabinet despite his strong protest.

On that evening, Zhou said he called the mayor’s hotline and the local epidemic control command center to complain. Two days later, two local government officials turned up at his door, asking him to understand and cooperate with the government’s epidemic control efforts. They also told him the camera would only take still images when his door moved and wouldn’t record any video or audio.

“(The camera) had a huge impact on me psychologically,” he said. “I tried not to make phone calls, fearing the camera would record my conversations by any chance. I couldn’t stop worrying even when I went to sleep, after I closed the bedroom door.”

The epidemic control command center of the district Zhou lives in confirmed to CNN the use of cameras to enforce home quarantine, but declined to give further details.

In the eastern city of Nanjing, the Chunxi sub-district government posted photoson Weibo showing how authorities were using cameras to ensure quarantine. One photo showed a camera standing on a cabinet inside an apartment. Another showed a screenshot of footage of four cameras, some of which appeared to have been shot from inside people’s homes.

The Chuxi sub-district government declined to comment. The epidemic control command center in the district said the installation of cameras was not a mandatory policy, and some sub-district governments have chosen to adopt the measure themselves.

There is no official tally on the number of cameras installed to enforce home quarantine across China. But the Chaoyang district government in Jilin, a city of four million people, said in a statement that it had installed 500 cameras as of February 8.

Even in Beijing not everyone in home quarantine has a camera outside their home. Two residents, who recently returned to the city from Wuhan, said they had a magnetic alarm installed to their apartment doors, which would notify community workers if they stepped outside. CNN has reached out to Beijing authorities for comment.

Lahiffe, the Irish expat who lives in Beijing, believes the footage from his camera is being monitored by the community workers at his residential compound, who are charged with making sure he stays home and doesn’t have visitors – all from a smartphone.

“The guy’s phone has an app which (shows) all the doors,” Lahiffe said of one of the community workers who had come to install the camera. “You can see all the doors of the different cameras that have been installed,” he said, adding that he saw more than 30 doors on the app, all from his residential complex which he says is lived in by “mostly foreigners.”

Whenever Lina Ali, a Scandinavian expat living in the southern city of Guangzhou, opened her front door to receive food deliveries, she said a bright light shone from the camera that was trained on her apartment door while she was in quarantine.

She said her apartment building’s property management staff came to install a surveillance camera outside her front door on the first day of her home quarantine earlier this month.

“I hated when the camera would shine a bright light, they told us that it connects to the police station,” said Ali. CNN agreed to refer to her with a pseudonym to protect her safety. “It made me feel like I truly was a prisoner in my own home.”

In Shenzhen, the cameras used to monitor quarantined residents in one district were connected to the smartphones of police officers and community workers, according to a report on the district government’s website.

A phone screenshot of an app used by authorities to monitor the footage of cameras installed for people under home quarantine in Nanshan district, Shenzhen.

“If you look at China’s surveillance measures during the coronavirus outbreak, from the development of health codes to installation of surveillance cameras to enforce quarantine, we’re seeing an increasingly intrusive use of surveillance technologies that were previously only seen in particularly repressed regions, like Xinjiang,” she said, referring to the far western region home to China’s Uyghur minority.

China currently has no specific national law to regulate the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces. The Ministry of Public Security released a draft regulation on security cameras in 2016, but the ordinance is still waiting to be approved by the country’s national legislature. In recent years, some local governments have issued their own regulations on the cameras.

“The area outside a person’s front door is not part of their private residence and is considered a communal space. But the camera can be monitoring something personal, such as when the individual leaves and comes home,” he said.

Adding to the complexity of the issue is that these cameras are installed by authorities during a public health emergency for epidemic control purposes, so an individual’s privacy has to be balanced against public interest and safety, Tong said.

For now, it appears that the surveillance cameras on people’s front doors are not there to stay. After Ali and Zhou finished their quarantine, they said the cameras were taken down.

The community workers told Zhou he could keep the camera for free. But Zhou was so furious about having to live under its gaze for two weeks that he said he took out a hammer and smashed the device in front of the community workers.

“If surveillance cameras are placed in public places, there’s no problem – they can monitor and deter unlawful acts. But they shouldn’t appear in our private spaces,” he said.

SINGAPORE, July 11 (Reuters) - Myanmar"s junta government is installing Chinese-built cameras with facial recognition capabilities in more cities across the country, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

In tenders to procure and install the security cameras and facial recognition technology, the plans are described as safe city projects aimed at maintaining security and, in some cases, preserving civil peace, said the people who are or have been involved in the projects.

Since the February 2021 coup, local authorities have started new camera surveillance projects for at least five cities including Mawlamyine - the country"s fourth-largest city, according to information from the three people who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals by the junta.

The new projects are in addition to five cities where camera systems touted as crime prevention measures were either installed or planned by the previous government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the sources and local media.

A junta spokesman did not answer Reuters calls seeking comment. None of the 10 municipal governments, all of which are controlled by the junta, answered calls seeking comment. Reuters was not able to review the tenders or visit the cities to verify the installation of the cameras.

The junta is planning camera surveillance systems for cities in each of Myanmar"s seven states and seven regions, said one of the sources who was briefed on the junta"s plans on two occasions by different people.

The tenders have been won by local procurement firms including Fisca Security & Communication and Naung Yoe Technologies Co, the three sources said. The firms source the cameras and some related technology from Chinese surveillance giants Zhejiang Dahua Technology (002236.SZ) (Dahua), Huawei Technologies Co Ltd (HWT.UL) and Hikvision (002415.SZ), the three sources added.

"Surveillance cameras pose a serious risk to (Myanmar"s) democracy activists because the military and police can use them to track their movements, figure out connections between activists, identify safe houses and other gathering spots, and recognize and intercept cars and motorcycles used by activists," Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson said in a statement to Reuters.

The army has officers dedicated to analysing surveillance camera feeds, Nyi Thuta, a former captain who defected from the military in late February 2021, told Reuters. He said he was not aware of how many officers were assigned to this work, but described visiting CCTV control rooms staffed by soldiers in the capital Naypyidaw. Reuters was unable to independently verify this and the junta spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Mawlamyine held a tender for a camera surveillance system shortly after the coup, according to the three sources. The cities of Taunggyi and Dawei followed in the months after, two of them said.

The Mawlamyine tender was jointly won by Fisca and Naung Yoe, the two sources said. The tenders for Dawei and Taunggyi went to Fisca, said one source, adding that each city has seen hundreds of Dahua cameras installed this year.

Dahua cameras were installed this year in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin, a region of ethnic unrest, one source said, adding that the government of Hpa-an city has begun early discussions about a camera system.

Before the coup, Suu Kyi"s government installed CCTV cameras in Naypyidaw and Yangon, Myanmar"s biggest city, while the city of Mandalay had also inked an agreement for a camera surveillance system with Huawei, according to local media and two sources.

Huawei cameras were combined with facial recognition software in Naypyidaw, one source said. In Yangon, the surveillance system consists of a Hikvision traffic command centre and a mix of camera brands, said another of the sources.

Since the coup, the junta has told Mandalay - Myanmar"s second-largest city - to move more quickly on installing cameras, two sources said. One source said that at least 300 Huawei cameras were installed before the coup, with hundreds more to come.

In the state of Rakhine, where the military is battling an ethnic armed group, CCTV systems with Huawei cameras have been deployed by Myanmar"s security forces since 2019 in the city of Sittwe and some villages, one source said.

The Feelworld Lut7 monitor is a great find for this price. The 2200nit Touch Screen is a MUST HAVE. I have been able to use it on bright, sunny, beach days without the need for an additional sun-hood because of how bright it gets. That brightness will also save you on those cloudy, overcast days. On-camera monitors tend to throw back a harsh, almost mirror-like, reflection where the Feelworld Lut7 is clean and easy to see (see video for an example and an unboxing). The 7inch screen is nice because it allows you to pull up other items like RGB Parade, Vectorscopes, Grids, Audio Levels, etc. and still have plenty of room to monitor your video (again see video example). This monitor has a lot of the professional features you would find on much pricier models at a more affordable price. False Colors, RGB Parade, Wave, Vectorscope, Audio Bars, Audio and HMDI Out, LUT support...I could go on an on. Again, for this price range it is a great monitor!

Xiaomi Corporation (Chinese: Xiaomi and registered as Xiaomi Inc., is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of consumer electronics and related software, home appliances, and household items. Behind Samsung, it is the second largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world, most of which run the MIUI operating system. The company is ranked 338th and is the youngest company on the Fortune Global 500.

In 2022, Leica Camera entered a strategic partnership with Xiaomi to jointly develop Leica cameras to be used in Xiaomi flagship smartphones, succeeding the partnership between Huawei and Leica. The first flagship smartphones under this new partnership were the Xiaomi 12S Ultra and Xiaomi MIX Fold 2, launched in July and August 2022, respectively.

Every morning, Mrs. Chen dons her bright purple tai chi pajamas and joins the dozen or so other members of Hongmen Martial Arts Group for practice outside Chongqing’s Jiangnan Stadium. But a few months ago, she was in such a rush to join their whirling sword-dance routine that she dropped her purse. Fortunately, a security guard noticed it lying in the public square via one of the overhead security cameras. He placed it at the lost and found, where Mrs. Chen gratefully retrieved it later.

“Were it not for these cameras, someone might have stolen it,” Mrs. Chen, who asked to be identified by only her surname, tells TIME on a smoggy morning in China’s sprawling central megacity. “Having these cameras everywhere makes me feel safe.”

What sounds like a lucky escape is almost to be expected in Chongqing, which has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most surveilled city. The seething mass of 15.35 million people straddling the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers boasted 2.58 million surveillance cameras in 2019, according to an analysis published in August by the tech-research website Comparitech. That’s a frankly Orwellian ratio of one CCTV camera for every 5.9 citizens—or 30 times their prevalence in Washington, D.C.

Every move in the city is seemingly captured digitally. Cameras perch over sidewalks, hover across busy intersections and swivel above shopping districts. But Chongqing is by no means unique. Eight of the top 10 most surveilled cities in the world are in China, according to Comparitech, as the world’s No. 2 economy rolls out an unparalleled system of social control. Facial–recognition software is used to access office buildings, snare criminals and even shame jaywalkers at busy intersections. China today is a harbinger of what society looks like when surveillance proliferates unchecked.

Some 1,500 miles northwest of where Mrs. Chen recovered her purse, surveillance in China’s restive region of Xinjiang has helped put an estimated 1 million people into “re-education centers” akin to concentration camps, according to the U.N. Many were arrested, tried and convicted by computer algorithm based on data harvested by the cameras that stud every 20 steps in some parts.

Sarsenbek Akaruli, 45, a veterinarian and trader from the Xinjiang city of Ili, was arrested on Nov. 2, 2017, and remains in a detention camp after police found the banned messaging app WhatsApp on his cell phone, according to his wife Gulnur Kosdaulet. A citizen of neighboring Kazakhstan, she has traveled to Xinjiang four times to search for him but found even friends in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reluctant to help. “Nobody wanted to risk being recorded on security cameras talking to me in case they ended up in the camps themselves,” she tells TIME.

Surveillance governs all aspects of camp life. Bakitali Nur, 47, a fruit and vegetable exporter in the Xinjiang town of Khorgos, was arrested after authorities became suspicious of his frequent business trips abroad. The father of three says he spent a year in a single room with seven other inmates, all clad in blue jumpsuits, forced to sit still on plastic stools for 17 hours straight as four HikVision cameras recorded every move. “Anyone caught talking or moving was forced into stress positions for hours at a time,” he says.

Bakitali was released only after he developed a chronic illness. But his surveillance hell continued over five months of virtual house arrest, which is common for former detainees. He was forbidden from traveling outside his village without permission, and a CCTV camera was installed opposite his home. Every time he approached the front door, a policeman would call to ask where he was going. He had to report to the local government office every day to undergo “political education” and write a self-criticism detailing his previous day’s activities. Unable to travel for work, former detainees like Bakitali are often obliged to toil at government factories for wages as miserly as 35¢ per day, according to former workers interviewed by TIME. “The entire system is designed to suppress us,” Bakitali says in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he escaped in May.

Besides the surveillance cameras, people are required to register their ID numbers for activities as mundane as renting a karaoke booth. Muslims are forced from buses to have their IDs checked while ethnic Han Chinese passengers wait in their seats. At intersections, drivers are ushered from their vehicles by armed police and through Tera-Snap “revolving body detector” equipment. In the southern Xinjiang oasis town of Hotan, a facial–recognition booth is even installed at the local produce market. When a system struggled to compute the face of this Western TIME reporter, the impatient Han women queuing behind berated the operator, “Hurry up, he’s not a Uighur, let him through.”

Even in China, where civil liberties have long been sacrificed for what the CCP deems the greater good, privacy concerns are bubbling up. On Oct. 28, a professor in eastern China sued Hangzhou Safari Park for “violating consumer privacy law by compulsorily collecting visitors’ individual characteristics,” after the park announced its intention to adopt facial–recognition entry gates. In Chongqing, a move to install surveillance cameras in 15,000 licensed taxicabs has met a backlash from drivers. “Now I can’t cuddle my girlfriend off duty or curse my bosses,” one driver grumbles to TIME.

Russia’s election meddling around the world highlights the risks of commercially harvested data being repurposed for nefarious goals. It’s a message taken to heart in Hong Kong, where millions have protested over the past five months to push for more democracy. These demonstrators have found themselves in the crosshairs after being identified via CCTV cameras or social media. Employees for state airline Cathay Pacific have been fired and others investigated based on evidence reportedly gleaned via online posts and private messaging apps.

This has led demonstrators to adopt intricate tactics to evade Big Brother’s all-seeing eye. Clad in helmets, face masks and reflective goggles, they prepare for confrontations with the police with military precision. A vanguard clutch umbrellas aloft to shield their activities from prying eyes, before a second wave advances to attack overhead cameras with tape, spray paint and buzz saws. From behind, a covering fire of laser pointers attempts to disrupt the recordings of security officers’ body-mounted cameras.

Fending off the cameras is just one response. When Matthew, 22, who used only his first name for his own safety, heads to the front lines, he always leaves his regular cell phone at home and takes a burner. Aside from swapping SIM cards, he rarely reuses handsets multiple times since each has a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity digital serial number that he says police can trace. He also switches among different VPNs—software to mask a user’s location—and pays for protest–related purchases with cash or untraceable top-up credit cards. Voice calls are made only as a last resort, he says. “Once I had no choice but to make a call, but I threw away my SIM immediately afterward.”

The Hong Kong government denies its smart cameras and lampposts use facial-recognition technology. But “it really comes down to whether you trust institutions,” says privacy expert Tsui. For Matthew, the risks are real and stark: “We are fighting to stop Hong Kong becoming another Xinjiang.”

Ultimately, even protesters’ forensic safeguards may not be enough as technology advances. In his Beijing headquarters, Huang Yongzhen, CEO of AI firm Watrix, shows off his latest gait-recognition software, which can identify people from 50 meters away by analyzing thousands of metrics about their walk—even with faces covered or backs to the camera. It’s already been rolled out by security services across China, he says, though he’s ambivalent about privacy concerns. “From our perspective, we just provide the technology,” he says. “As for how it’s used, like all high tech, it may be a double-edged sword.”

Back in Chongqing, shopkeeper Li Hongmei sees only the positives. She says the public CCTV cameras right outside her convenience store didn’t stop a spate of thefts, so she had six cameras installed inside the shop. Within days, she says, she nabbed the serial thief who’d been pilfering milk from her shelves. “Chinese people don’t care about privacy. We want security,” she says. “It’s still not enough cameras. We need more.”

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