In the news that shocked no one, Facebook last week was discovered to be collecting user data through independent Android apps without users’ consent.
Facebook’s long-running data privacy scandals have made painfully clear to app users what experts have been warning against for years: smartphones are basically tracking devices. And this realization is becoming clear in China, too.
Last week, a non-government regulator called the Internet Society of China held a panel alongside the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology where they called out Chinese apps for collecting too much user data.
They said 13 apps are collecting excessive amounts of potentially sensitive personal data, including SMS messages, address books, location, and recordings. Among them are Taobao’s spin-off Tmall, popular travel app Ctrip (which owns Skyscanner), and short-video app Kuaishou.
Reacting to the news, some Weibo commentators speculated that the Chinese version of short-video app Tik Tok seems to have a similar arrangement with China’s biggest ecommerce site Taobao as Facebook has with its partners.
“Whatever I search on Taobao, if I scroll down Tik Tok in a couple of hours, there will be Taobao advertisements,” said one user.
This is not the first time popular Chinese apps are called out for excessive data collection. In November 2018, the China Consumers Association (CCA) tested 100 apps in 10 different categories and found 59 of them retaining too much information about a user’s location. Some of these apps also collected sensitive data related to their contacts, identities, and/or phone numbers.
Forty-seven apps were deemed to have inadequate privacy protections, while 34 apps didn’t have a privacy policy at all.
One app was even accused of snatching our faces. Selfie app Meitu was criticized for excessively collecting recognizable bio-data and financial information from its users.
In 2017, Baidu was sued by a consumer protection organization for collecting users’ information without consent, including calls, location data, messages, and contacts. Baidu has denied the claims.
Around the same time, Alibaba came under fire for automatically enrolling users of its payment app Alipay into its credit scoring service Sesame Credit.
There was even an accusation that Tencent was using WeChat to listen to users. But this is not from some random online troll, it’s from the chairman of Chinese automaker Geely. Perhaps, those unfounded fears – as far as we know – are why Tencent recently became one of the first Chinese tech companies to issue a data privacy white paper, vowing to limit personal data collection.
This culminated with the arrival of China’s national standard on personal information protection in May 2018 – the same month when the EU’s GDPR came into effect. Although the regulation isn’t exactly mandatory, it did make the protection of data privacy a real issue.
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