If people who venture into one public Chinese bathroom — in the city of Jinan — have a feeling like they’re being watched, there may be a good reason for it.

Local officials in the capital of China’s Shandong province have installed a facial recognition technology system onto the bathroom’s toilet paper dispenser, an effort to cut down on people who come into the bathroom to steal toilet paper. As Russian media outlet Sputnik reports, the dispenser is able to detect if someone is a “repeat customer” in the bathroom and can restrict toilet paper usage accordingly.

“It works like this: the person walks up to the machine and has their face scanned, and then the dispenser gives them about 27 inches of toilet paper, NTDTV reported,” the report details. ‘To get another round of paper, users have to wait nine minutes and have another facial scan.”

“The dispenser can reportedly tell if it is a new person using it or a returning user.”

The bathroom appeared to be one of the first to implement a technology that had been developed to help bathrooms cut down on waste — so to speak. As the CBC reported last year, this technology has been initially aimed at popular tourist destinations in an effort to keep the bathrooms as clean and efficient as possible. The idea is to restrict toilet people to people who may be coming back too frequently, ensuring that a sufficient amount remains to take care of the high traffic in these tourist areas.

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