navigating the shifting legal landscape for biometric data China’s Cyberspace Administration just dropped a draft regulation on AI avatars that should serve as a massive signal to anyone building computer vision (CV) or facial comparison tools. While the headlines focus on "digital humans" and TikTok clones, the technical reality is far more significant for developers: we are moving from an era of detection to an era of documentation. For years, the computer vision community has been obsessed with the detection problem—building better GAN-discriminators to spot deepfakes. But China's rules, which mandate explicit consent and verifiable authorization chains for biometric likenesses, suggest that the "is_fake" boolean in your logic is no longer enough. The new requirement is a "is_authorized" metadata chain that is immutable and court-ready. The Shift from Detection to Provenance For developers working with facial comparison technology, this shifts the engineering burden.…