China’s bathroom bandits flushed out
A YEARS-LONG crime spree by Chinese toilet paper thieves may have reached the end of its roll after park officials in southern Beijing installed facial recognition technology to flush out bathroom bandits.
Park managers at the Temple of Heaven, an expanse of imperial landmarks in the capital, spent three years testing ways to foil the toilet looters, including fingerprinting and laser sensors, before they settled on the new technology, which was introduced at the weekend.
Elderly square dancers taking their bathroom breaks yesterday were greeted by a robotic voice: “Welcome! Please stand in the recognition zone.”
One by one, they obediently positioned themselves on a yellow square and watched their faces pop up on a blinking blue screen mounted to the wall. Then the machine dispensed their individual allotment of 60cm of toilet paper.
If the same person tries to collect more bathroom tissue within nine minutes, he or she will be met with a polite rejection: “Please try again later.”
Toilet paper crooks have been known to take home entire rolls, smuggling them out in bulging bags that go undetected at the security gates.
The high-tech solution was welcomed by some of the park’s regulars.
“It’s pretty good, as long as we have enough to use,” Pu Meilang, 68, who takes frequent strolls around Temple of Heaven, said.
The park has sought to put a stop to toilet paper bandits for years, according to Lei Zhenshan, a marketing manager for Shoulian Zhineng, the company behind the device. In 2014, they started experimenting with different ways of tracking toilet paper usage and finally settled on facial recognition, but not without some internal dispute.
“It seemed a little awkward at first,” Zhenshan said.
“However, we saw that the degree of waste was quite severe, and decided to take this technical approach to correcting people’s behaviour.”
Though most park-goers were able to quickly get their bathroom tissues yesterday, the system was not without small inconveniences.
One woman had a toddler who was too short to reach the camera range.
Users on a social network were sceptical about the device’s success.
“In two days, the facial recognition machine will be taken too,” one commentator wrote.