China Internet users want privacy
SHANGHAI — China’s biggest online payment company offers its hundreds of millions of users a breakdown on their spending each year, showing everything from their environmental impact to their ranking among shoppers in their area. Many spenders — not shy, and occasionally even a bit boastful about their personal finances — in turn share the details on social media.
This year, the marketing stunt has run into a problem: China’s growing sense of personal privacy.
Ant Financial, an affiliate of the e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, apologized to users Thursday after prompting an outcry by automatically enrolling in its social credit program those who wanted to see the breakdown. The program, called Sesame Credit, tracks personal relationships and behavior patterns to help determine lending decisions.
That Sesame Credit program is part of a broader push in China to track how people go about their day, one that could feed into the Chinese government’s ambitious — and, some people would say, Orwellian — effort to use technology to keep a closer watch on its citizens.
The episode was a rare, public rebuttal of a prevailing trend in China. The country’s largest internet companies, and the government itself, have gathered ever more data on internet users. While Chinese culture does not emphasize personal privacy and Chinese internet users have grown accustomed to surveillance and censorship, the anger represents a nascent, but growing, demand for increased privacy and data protections online.
Fueled in part by widespread internet fraud and personal information theft, the call for privacy, if it continues, could become a major challenge to China’s internet titans, and eventually to the cyber-authoritarian aspirations of the Chinese government itself.
China has long had high levels of surveillance, from ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras in its big cities to the monitoring of much of its citizens’ online communications. But such efforts have proliferated as new technologies like facial recognition have begun to be rolled out and artificial intelligence has made crunching vast amounts of data much easier.
For now, it is far from clear that this rising discomfort will give way to policy changes. Many Chinese people, even as they express concerns about how companies use their data online, offer little criticism of Beijing’s desire to use that data to help compile a broad social tracking system that rewards what it regards as good citizens and punishes others.
Still, recent signs indicate Chinese consumers are beginning to express some of the same privacy concerns long found in the United States and elsewhere.
This week, one of China’s most visible business leaders bemoaned what he said was a lack of privacy in China in general, and specifically on the country’s most widely used mobile chat service, WeChat.
“There’s no privacy and information security these days,” Li Shufu, the chairman of Geely Holding Group and Volvo Cars, said at a New Year’s forum. “When you walk on the road, there are surveillance cameras everywhere.”
“Pony Ma must be reading our WeChat messages every single day,” he added, referring to the founder of Tencent, the Chinese internet giant that runs the social media and chat app, which has nearly 1 billion users.