During the peak of the coronavirus outbreak in China, the authorities' rapid response led to the use of apps installed on citizens' cell phones. The goal was to identify and isolate those who might be spreading the virus. Currently, official statistics from the country suggest that the peak of the epidemic has already passed there. However, the government's monitoring apps have not been discontinued, and the government is studying ways to make the apps a permanent part of daily life.
With China's mixed history of protecting personal information from hackers and leaks, and despite technology undoubtedly proving useful in helping many workers and employers return to their lives, concerns are being raised about how the use of these applications could become invasive and disrespectful of everyone's privacy.
Authorities have adopted a comprehensive view of using high-tech surveillance tools in the name of public welfare. Government virus tracking software is collecting information from people in hundreds of cities across the country, including location data. Few limits have been set by authorities on how this data can be used. And now, hoping the software will continue to be used as more than just an emergency measure, authorities are loading their applications with new features.
According to a official announcementZhou Jiangyong, Communist Party secretary of the Hangzhou Eastern Technology Center, stated that the city's app should be an "intimate health guardian" for residents, used frequently and "loved so much that you can't bear to be separated from it."
“Epidemic prevention and control needs the support of big data technology, but that doesn’t mean agencies and individuals can randomly collect information from citizens, borrowing the name of prevention and control,” Li Sihui, a researcher at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, wrote in a comment.
In China, people register for the virus tracking system by submitting their personal information, recent travel details, and health status to one of several apps. The software uses this and other data to assign a color code—green, yellow, or red—indicating whether the holder is a risk of infection. At subway entrances, offices, and shopping malls, inspectors prohibit entry to anyone who does not have a green code.
The way in which someone's code colors are defined, however, has never been explained in detail. This causes confusion among people who don't understand why they receive a yellow or red code.
In Hangzhou, where the system was pioneered, authorities are exploring expanding the health code to classify citizens with a “personal health index,” according to a post last week on an official account. social mediaIt is unclear, however, how the ranking would be used. However, a graph in the post shows users receiving a score from 0 to 100 based on how much they sleep, how many steps they take, how much they smoke and drink, as well as other unspecified metrics.
The reaction was swift. “Does this blatantly violate privacy to monitor and discriminate against unhealthy people?” Wang Xin wrote in Weibo social platform, where she has 2,5 million followers. “I know that in this age of big data, it’s so easy for those who control the data to verify and use personal information in a matter of minutes,” she wrote. Shen JiakeBut Hangzhou's plan "goes too far," he said. Robin Li, head of Baidu, proposed At a meeting of China's top political advisory body, the government was called to create a mechanism to delete personal information collected during the pandemic.
Lei Ruipeng, professor of bioethics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, stated That if the authorities had specific reasons to retain health code data after the coronavirus threat passed, these reasons should be clarified so that user consent could be obtained. However, to date, this mechanism has not yet materialized.
