No real protection for smartphone users
WeChat said they “do not keep the chat records of users”. We are not sure about that, but we are sure that they can do so whenever they want to.
A simple test will show how. If someone sends you a message while your smartphone is turned off, you will still get that message when you turn it on again. During the intervening period, the information was stored on WeChat servers.
Besides, WeChat used to publish commercial advertisements in “moments” that suited each user’s habits. There is only one known way of doing that, big data analysis, which involves collecting users’ information, names, addresses, spending habits and so on and analyzing them to reach certain conclusions.
There are many P2P (point-topoint) data transferring technologies that allow one person to directly send a piece of information to another without going through any public server. But since such technologies are very costly, they can’t be promoted for commercial use, at least for now.
China plans to make it mandatory for IT companies to apply for special registration if they want to put users’ data to commercial use. That will help protect users’ data from being misused by big technology firms for profits.
Liu Quan, a senior researcher in cybersecurity at the China Center for Information Industry Development affiliated to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
buried under innumerable other words. Worse, its default choice was “I agree”, giving Alibaba automatic authorization to analyze users’ personal information.
The two cases reflect the risks personal information face in this age of mobile internet. The Constitution, the criminal law, civil law, and the tort law all have articles on this issue. The Cyber Security Law, which came into effect on June 1, 2017, also stresses that people’s personal information should be protected.
Still the legislature and judiciary have to take measures to better protect people’s private information. Perhaps we need a special law or amend the existing laws to regulate the internet service providers and prevent them for misusing users’ data. Because of the technologies at their disposal, IT companies wield immense power, and power of any kind should be put in the cage of law.