The Economist Asia - 27.01.2018

The EconomistJanuary 27th 2018 25

1

For daily analysis and debate on China, visit

Economist.com/china

X

U YUYU was a poor 18-year-old stu-

dent from the coastal province of

Shandong when, on the eve of going to

university in 2016, she was defrauded of

the savings that her family had painstak-

ingly accumulated for her. She died of a

heart attack that was caused, a court said,

by the fraud. Ms Xu’s fate sparked an im-

passioned debate in China about data pri-

vacy because the scammer, Chen Wenhui,

had paid a hacker for stealing her personal

details. He was sentenced to life in jail for

theft of private information.

China has a reputation for lax controls

over the gathering, storage and use of digi-

tal 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 en-

gine. The group claims that a Baidu app il-

legally monitors users’ phone calls with-

out telling them. At the same time, Ant

Financial, the financial arm of Alibaba, the

country’s largest e-commerce group, apol-

ogised for a default setting on its mobile-

money app that automatically enrolled

customers in a credit-scoring scheme,

called Sesame Credit, without users’ con-

sent. The third of China’s big three internet

dents outside China stated that caution

was necessary when sharing personal in-

formation online. But only half of those

polled in China agreed. In 2015 Harvard

Business Review, a journal, tried to esti-

mate what value people in different coun-

tries attached to personal data. It found

that Chinese would pay less to protect data

from their government-issued identifica-

tion cards and credit cards than people

from America, Britain and Germany. More

than 60% of respondents in a large survey

conducted byChina Youth Daily, a state-

owned newspaper, said that the default

settings in their mobile apps allowed their

personal information to be shared with

third parties. Chinese law did not define

what counts as personal information until

a cyber-securitybill took effect last year.

Two thingsare helping to change public

attitudes. One is rising concern about on-

line fraud, a huge problem in China. A sur-

vey in 2016 by the Internet Society of China

found that no less than 84% of respondents

said they had suffered from some form of

data theft. The number of cases seems to

be rising. In 2017, according to Legal Daily, a

newspaper, the police investigated 4,900

cases of theft of personal information, re-

sulting in the arrests of over 15,000 people.

That is twice the number of cases and four

times as manysuspects as in the previous

year. Worries about data theft are not the

same as concerns about privacy. But the

two sentiments often overlap.

The other big change is the surprising

emergence of China’s internet companies

as lobbyists for better data protection, even

though their motives are mixed. On the

one hand, the data they are scooping up

from consumers are becoming an ever

more prized commodity. The companies

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’spopular social-me-

dia app, “every single day”.

Consumers in China have good cause

to worry. Data collected through one medi-

um 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 artifi-

cial intelligence (AI), his news was all

about strawberries. His post on the experi-

ence went viral in January. Toutiao denied

it was snooping but conceded, blandly,

that the storyrevealed a growing public

“awareness of privacy”.

Cultural evolution

Anxiety about it is indeed growing, but

from a low base. The Chinese word for pri-

vacy, yinsi, has a negative connotation of

secrecy. Things that in the West are taboo in

conversation between strangers—for ex-

ample, asking about the other person’s sal-

ary—are often discussed in China.

Such traditions inform behaviour in the

digital world. The Boston Consulting

Group says that in a dozen countries it sur-

veyed in 2013, three-quarters of respon-

Data privacy

Public pushback

BEIJING AND HONG KONG

Consumers and tech firms are taking privacy more seriously. The government is not

China

Also in this section

26 The perils of rap music

РЕЛИЗ

ГРУППЫ

"What's

News"