Domestically, China is using its surveillance technology to monitor, detain and repress its ethnic Uighur Muslim population in its Xinjiang region, in the far west of China. Many Uighurs are interned in re-education camps, including one that reportedly occupies more than 195,000 square metres. The employment of surveillance AI against the Uighur population offers a disturbing indication of how the technology may be used by autocratic regimes in other parts of the world.

“The use of this technology against the Uighur population confirms the worries people have about oppressive use of surveillance technology,” Feldstein said.

Liberal democracies are struggling with the ethical dilemmas posed by the massive growth of surveillance technology. Critics of the growth of unregulated surveillance technology argue that the US blacklist of Chinese surveillance and AI companies is a good first step, but it won’t stop the global expansion of the technology. In addition to the United States and China, Israel, Italy and Japan are actively manufacturing and supplying surveillance technology, Feldstein said.

“I don’t think you can stop the spread of this kind of technology,” he added.

However, liberal democracies such as the United States and Canada can take other steps to help limit the impact of the technology. Currently, regulation around surveillance systems and privacy controls is in its infancy.

“It’s the wild, wild west right now, when you consider how your data is transported from one database to another,” Feldstein said.

In January, The Intercept reported that Amazon provided its researchers in Ukraine access to a cloud storage service that contained every video created by its consumer security camera service called Ring, which is used by millions of households. In August, The Washington Post reported that Ring had set up a video-sharing partnership with more than 400 police forces across the United States.

Feldstein, who was deputy assistant secretary of state in the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 2014 to 2017, argues that the United States should lead the way in terms of building rules for control of personal data. Two overarching themes have emerged: regulators should require more transparency about the distribution and sale of personal video data, and citizens should be required to consent to their data being moved or sold to brokers or other companies or individuals.

“If your data is moved or sold to brokers or other companies you should consent for that data to go there,” he said. “If you do consent, you should receive part of the profit related to the sale of data about yourself. You should be asked, ‘Do you approve that the information about you is being sold or distributed to other firms?’ Transparency and consent should be central to the distribution of surveillance data.”

Finally, policy makers should set up tough enforcement mechanisms, including fines and compensation for victims, to mitigate abuse. “If your data was distributed without user consent there should be a fine,” he said. Cities must evaluate whether privacy rights trump police enforcement considerations. In May, San Francisco set up a moratorium on the use of facial recognition software by the police and other government offices.

As surveillance technology expands globally, it has been driven in part by thousands of informal workers who tag massive databases of images and videos so that AI technology can do a better job of building algorithms to identify real-world objects.

“There is a whole gig economy of workers who are tagging objects, to train an algorithm to understand that a tree is a tree,” he said. “These workers are tagging millions of different pictures of trees so it can learn over time what is a tree and differentiate it from a lamppost. All this tagging helps create image data sets to train how video recognition will work.”

And, as in other areas, data tagging has a dual purpose. Beyond surveillance, the data could be used for a variety of other purposes — maybe helping autonomous vehicles drive more accurately, maybe fuelling the surveillance systems built by one of the United States’ blacklisted companies. Overall, surveillance by autocratic governments is on the rise and a blacklist employed by one nation won’t stop it.