China’s wallet apps require real-name registration by July 1 – or else

China’s government likes having people’s real names tied to what they’re doing online. Real-name registration first came to mobile phones numbers years ago, but it has since been applied to everything from Weibo to ecommerce. And now, it’s coming to the country’s top epayment systems.

Both Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay have announced that accounts not bound to a real identity (either by inputting the info directly or by linking the account with a domestic bank card) must do so by July 1 or face having access to their funds limited. That means that a lot of people have some real-name information inputting to do, as reportedly only 51 percent of China’s domestic epayment accounts are currently linked to users’ real names.

Alipay – run by Alibaba spin-off company Ant Financial – shown after being used to pay for coffee.

It’s not entirely clear what accounts still in breach of the new rules will experience when the July 1 deadline hits. Alipay has denied rumors that they will be “frozen,” but its own infographic explaining the changes suggests that users who don’t verify their identities by the deadline won’t be able to access their accounts until they have “continued in completing their identity information.” WeChat Pay has said access to some account features (including receiving money) could be “restricted,” but exactly how that might work isn’t clear.

Plenty of users are worried that their identity information won’t be protected.

That said, it’s possible that nothing will happen at all. Certainly, hard deadlines have come and gone in previous real-name enforcement campaigns with little in the way of action. During the heyday of the Twitter-esque Weibo, the company talked a good game about requiring real-name registration for years before closing the loopholes that made it easy for non-registered customers to use the service.

Online, the reaction seems to be primarily one of concern about information security. In comments on Sina Tech, for example, there are few concerns about the intent behind the policy, but plenty of users worried that their identity information won’t be protected. “All this does is give fraudsters a good new opportunity,” wrote one commenter.

“There’s nothing wrong with real identities,” wrote another. “The problem is that you can’t guarantee our information security. You just unilaterally demand registration without solving [security] so that users bear all the risk. It’s very hard to accept.”

See also: A brief history of China’s campaign to enforce real-name registration online