Personal information collected to fight Covid-19 is being spread online in China
Aggressive data collection during the pandemic has led to rampant data leaks on WeChat
When the data leaks started, people from Wuhan were the first victims. But now people across China are grappling with whether the personal information they surrendered to fight the pandemic is being well protected.
Around the time of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, many people traveling back to their hometowns from Wuhan were receiving less-than-friendly phone calls and WeChat messages from strangers. Some angrily told them to return to the virus-stricken city. Others asked if they had been eating wild animals, an unconfirmed theory about how the deadly coronavirus first reached humans.
In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, people from Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital, faced widespread discrimination. But data collection would soon become the default method of combating the spread of the coronavirus as local governments and organizations sought to track who was going where. Soon enough, data leaks were affecting a lot more people than just those from Wuhan.
Last month, the names, addresses, phone numbers and national ID numbers of 6,685 people were circulated in WeChat groups. The victims all had one thing in common: They visited the same hospital in the eastern city of Qingdao.
The leaks are perhaps made easier by how much China’s fight against the coronavirus relies on troves of personal data collected to trace who has contact with potential coronavirus carriers. This data collection also helps enforce strict social distancing and quarantine measures that some describe as draconian.
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(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, an affiliate of Alipay owner Ant Financial.)
“All societies must grapple with how to balance public health interests with personal privacy rights,” said Stuart Hargreaves, a professor at the Faculty of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
But many Chinese media reports show that personal information leaks from anti-epidemic efforts are happening on a large scale in China. And in some cases, those in charge of the data are the ones leaking it.
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China has many laws and regulations for protecting people’s personal information, according to Susan Ning, partner at the law firm King & Wood Mallesons. But enforcing these laws is another matter.
Enforcement remains difficult because different organizations and individuals have different understandings about what crosses the line into illegal behavior, Ning said. The result has been people having their data collected illegally in the name of controlling the spread of the virus, according to Ning.
This could put China at odds with liberal states, according to Hargreaves. In more liberal countries, it’s generally accepted that limitations on rights can be justified in the name of public health, but they should be proportional and no more than necessary, Hargreaves said. This means these measures should be removed once the threat of the pandemic has passed.
“Of course, the [Chinese] central authorities approach the question of surveillance in a different way,” Hargreaves said. “So it may be the case that measures introduced under the guise of preventing the spread of Covid-19 remain in place there far longer than elsewhere.”