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Nanjing Official Jailed for Selling Private Information

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Would you pay Facebook not to sell your data? The very essence of this question, asked by Sean Burch, writing for The Register Citizen, shows the stark reality we all now face when sharing our personal information online.

Facebook’s recent privacy scandal has dunked Mr. Zuckerberg and his company into hot water again, over claims “mistakes had been made” when Cambridge Analytica (an APP) was able to collect the information of 50 million unsuspecting users.

A researcher from Cambridge built the APP for Facebook users, which allowed the 270,000 people who downloaded it to build “personality profiles” of 50 million users by accessing “liked” pages.

As a result of this major privacy leak, a researcher from Dartmouth university has suggested paying Facebook US$100 per year for the company not to sell your information. His suggestion is based on the notion that the company’s current security solution is “not going to cut it”.

So if the world’s biggest social networking enterprise cannot keep a hold on the private information of 50 million of its users, then what foul play is at work elsewhere? In China, where arguably there is not one adult person whose information is not stored in a cloud somewhere, how does one combat such problems?

Shanghai publication, The Paper, Chinese sister to English news house Sixth Tone, yesterday published an article about a Nanjing government worker who has been jailed for 4 years and fined ¥90,000, for illegally disclosing 820,000 pieces of information to a colleague. The article goes on to say that, “In recent years, the leakage of citizen information has become ‘routine’, and personal privacy is facing serious threats that has attracted attention from all walks of life”.

Since April 2010, the person in question, identified as Mr. Liu, served as a deputy chief officer and chief clerk at a Nanjing government unit. According to court findings, he used his position to collect the information of a number of enterprises.

During that time, Liu sold more than 700,000 pieces of corporate information, which included the personal information of staff. “From November 2015 to July 2016, [another] defendant, Kwak, purchased corporate information [that came with] the personal information of a certain Nanjing network company at a price of ¥15,000 per year for the purpose of making telephone sales and providing the above information to Liu”, states the article.

During court proceedings, Mr Liu argued that the selling of corporate information is not the same as the selling of private information, because, “The citizen’s personal information used for company registration no longer has personal attributes, and its behaviour does not constitute the crime of infringement of citizens’ personal information”.

Disagreeing with Liu’s argument, the judge commented, “Liu, as a national public official, should have a special duty of confidentiality to protect citizens’ personal information… The leakage of citizen information has caused bad social influence and its behaviour constitutes a crime. In order to infringe on the personal information of citizens, one should be severely punished according to law”.

The use of personal data in Nanjing has been much in the news of late. Just earlier this week, a Nanjing court lifted a lawsuit that it had slapped on Baidu for failing to remove from its APP the capability to monitor users’ phone calls.

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