Does Xinjiang conduct large-scale surveillance on local ethnic minorities?

Full of ignorance of and bias against China, some people from the US and other Western countries have recently made groundless accusations against and disseminated many fallacies about China's human rights conditions concerning Xinjiang.

Here is one of the rumors they spread, and the fact.

Rumor: Xinjiang conducts large-scale surveillance on local ethnic minorities.

Fact:

- It is an international common practice to harness modern technology and big data in improving social governance. For example, there were 4.2 million surveillance cameras installed in the UK as early as 2010, the highest number in the world then. Today the country has about six million cameras, one for every ten people. In the United States, facial recognition is conducted in the top 20 airports against passengers. The city surveillance system built by New York police has devices covering every neighborhood of the city watching people and vehicles on the street and tracking and screening information on people's mobile phones. What Xinjiang has done in this respect pales significantly in comparison with these two countries.

- The cameras in urban and rural public places, main roads and transport hubs in Xinjiang are installed in accordance with the law for the purpose of improving social governance and forestalling and combating crimes. These measures make people feel safer and are widely supported by people of all ethnic groups. The measure does not target any specific ethnicity, not to mention that cameras by themselves identify or target no specific ethnicity. They are there to deter bad guys and protect good people.