To combat the odd crime of toilet paper theft at Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park, facial recognition software has been placed inside the park's bathroom stalls.
In order to get the allotted number of sheets, a person makes eye contact with a computer, CNN reports, and then a few pieces of toilet paper are released. Visitors better hope they don't have any issues, because once their face is recognized, they can't get any additional sheets until nine long minutes have passed. Visitors to the park say the culprits were older people who had no desire to pay for toilet paper at the store, so they just stole some from the park.
While this may seem like overreach to some, in China, many public restrooms don't even offer toilet paper, making this Big Brother-esque program easy to accept; visitor Wu Qingqi told CNN it was "necessary" because "there are many people wasting public resources," while Liu Mei believes that people who go to the park for free toilet paper "have already lost their self dignity. Do you think they would understand what personal privacy is?"
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