Page 25 - The Economist Asia January 2018

China The Economist January 27th 2018 25
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26 The perils of rap music

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Data privacy dents outside China stated that caution
was necessary when sharing personal in-
Public pushback 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
thatChinese would paylessto protect data
BEIJING AND HONG KONG from their government-issued identifica-
Consumers and tech firms are taking privacymore seriously. The governmentis not
tion cards and credit cards than people
U YUYU was a poor 18-year-old stu- firms, Tencent, also dealt with a storm of from America, Britain and Germany. More
Xdent from the coastal province of criticism after the head of one of China’s than 60% of respondents in a large survey
Shandong when, on the eve of going to largest car firms said Pony Ma, Tencent’s conducted by China Youth Daily, a state-
university in 2016, she was defrauded of founder, “must be watching” all messages owned newspaper, said that the default
the savings that her family had painstak- on WeChat, the firm’s popular social-me- settings in their mobile apps allowed their
ingly accumulated for her. She died of a dia app, “every single day”. personal information to be shared with
heart attack that was caused, a court said, Consumers in China have good cause third parties. Chinese law did not define
by the fraud. Ms Xu’s fate sparked an im- to worry. Data collected through one medi- what counts as personal information until
passioned debate in China about data pri- um can often end up in another. A man a cyber-security bill tookeffect last year.
vacy because the scammer, Chen Wenhui, who talked on his mobile phone one day Two thingsare helpingto change public
had paid a hacker for stealing her personal about picking strawberries said that when attitudes. One is rising concern about on-
details. He was sentenced to life in jail for he used his phone the next day to open line fraud, a huge problem in China. A sur-
theft ofprivate information. Toutiao, a news aggregator driven by artifi- veyin 2016 bythe InternetSocietyofChina
China has a reputation for lax controls cial intelligence (AI), his news was all found thatno lessthan 84% ofrespondents
over the gathering, storage and use of digi- about strawberries. His post on the experi- said they had suffered from some form of
tal data about individuals. But sensitivities ence went viral in January. Toutiao denied data theft. The number of cases seems to
about such matters are growing, and not it was snooping but conceded, blandly, be rising. In 2017, accordingto Legal Daily, a
just when information is stolen. that the story revealed a growing public newspaper, the police investigated 4,900
Thismonth a courtin the eastern cityof “awareness ofprivacy”. cases of theft of personal information, re-
Nanjing agreed to hear a case brought by a sulting in the arrests ofover15,000 people.
government-controlled consumers’ group Cultural evolution That is twice the number of cases and four
against Baidu, China’s largest search en- Anxiety about it is indeed growing, but times as many suspects as in the previous
gine. The group claims that a Baidu app il- from a low base. The Chinese word for pri- year. Worries about data theft are not the
legally monitors users’ phone calls with- vacy, yinsi, has a negative connotation of same as concerns about privacy. But the
out telling them. At the same time, Ant secrecy. Thingsthatin the Westare taboo in two sentiments often overlap.
Financial, the financial arm ofAlibaba, the conversation between strangers—for ex- The other big change is the surprising
country’s largest e-commerce group, apol- ample, askingabout the otherperson’s sal- emergence of China’s internet companies
ogised for a default setting on its mobile- ary—are often discussed in China. aslobbyistsforbetterdata protection, even
money app that automatically enrolled Such traditionsinform behaviourin the though their motives are mixed. On the
customers in a credit-scoring scheme, digital world. The Boston Consulting one hand, the data they are scooping up
called Sesame Credit, without users’ con- Group says that in a dozen countries it sur- from consumers are becoming an ever
sent. The third ofChina’s big three internet veyed in 2013, three-quarters of respon- more prized commodity. The companies 1