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China has a reputation for lax controls over the gathering, storage and use of digital data about individuals. But sensitivities about such matters are growing, and not just when information is stolen.
This month a court in the eastern city of Nanjing agreed to hear a case brought by a government-controlled consumers’ group against Baidu, China’s largest search engine. The group claims that a Baidu app illegally monitors users’ phone calls without telling them. At the same time, Ant Financial, the financial arm of Alibaba, the country’s largest e-commerce group, apologised for a default setting on its mobile-money app that automatically enrolled customers in a credit-scoring scheme, called Sesame Credit, without users’ consent. The third of China’s big three internet firms, Tencent, also dealt with a storm of criticism after the head of one of China’s largest car firms said Pony Ma, Tencent’s founder, “must be watching” all messages on WeChat, the firm’s popular social-media app, “every single day”.
Consumers in China have good cause to worry. Data collected through one medium can often end up in another. A man who talked on his mobile phone one day about picking strawberries said that when he used his phone the next day to open Toutiao, a news aggregator driven by artificial intelligence (AI), his news was all about strawberries. His post on the experience went viral in January. Toutiao denied it was snooping but conceded, blandly, that the story revealed a growing public “awareness of privacy”.
Cultural evolution
