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China Sees Surge in Personal Information Up For Sale (reuters.com)
Personal data has become widely available in China and can be scooped up for pennies by insurance companies, banks, loan sharks, and scammers alike, according to sellers and financiers interviewed by Reuters. From a report: In May, China introduced its most comprehensive data protection laws to date, tightening restrictions on the sharing of private data held by financial institutions and other firms. "Personal information leaks are risky," said Susan Ning, a partner at the law firm King & Wood Mallesons in Beijing. "Such information can facilitate other crimes," she added. Insurers often buy numbers from shadowy online data sellers, who themselves have acquired the information illegally, according to people in the industry. Some companies illegally buy information from the department of motor vehicles, car licensing authorities, car sellers, or from police stations, said Michelle Hu, a partner at Boston Consulting Group who has been a consultant on insurance deals. By entering keywords like "personal data" or "cellphone data", in Chinese, Reuters found more than 30 groups created for the purpose of selling and buying personal information on Tencent's instant messaging service QQ and Baidu forum site Tieba.
With their new Social Credit System, I thought they wanted every little thing to be collected and stored about them.
Surely they knew that every last bit of data that could be collected would be and shared with the proper authorities for snitching points. Why would anyone be supprised by this? In the US, we have people who take to social media to get others fired for revenge, to ruin other people's lives, or just plain harass them. What makes anyone think that establishing a governement agency for this task would result in anything less?
I'd look for more of the same in the future. That is unless China thinks that these kinds of leaks may degrade the SCS to the point that people will demand they stop using it. I doubt that will happen though. The SCS needs their snitches to control the public.
But all it told me was how many girl babies they drowned
Don't go chasing anushoals!
China's military has been very effective in steal other countries and people information. Maybe some of their highly trained people decided to go into business for themselves on their own countrymen. I feel so bad for them...sniff...
What are the peeps of the 'PEOPLE's ROC' gonna do about it ?? Sue them ??
Blockchain will fix everything.
trust in Blockchain.
This is likely an example of the natural effect of criminalizing something that has a demand that can be increased through marketing. Once it is criminalized, risk goes up, price goes up, profits go up, more people look at those profits and decide that it is worth the risk, crime organizations decide it is a profitable business that they can manage at a higher level and recruit marketers/pushers, and on and on and on.
Increase penalties, make it harder to get away with, and both price and volume will increase even more.
The PRoC says...
Know your damn role...
and keep your data private...
I suppose this puts to the test this is our own personal IP, and should be protected as much as other IP is currently protected? After all in China both are protected. ;-)
Oh seriously, fruit loops, exactly how much would the identities of the wealthy from the west be worth compared to cents per hour Chinese labour. That's why sensible people are pushing for treaties to start putting an end to this stuff, rather than letting corporations run riot, three letter agencies go insane with corporate insider trading information and crippling the internet will solve no ones problem. The smallest data segment of the internet is politics because it largely is the written word, forums and now some video stuff, the traffic is negligible and the impact enormous. So dicking with the internet will impact business to the tune of hundreds of billions lost, long before it impacts the negligible in volume, volume as in total and not how loud it is, political speech.
Want a better internet, start demanding network security treaties.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Just like everywhere else in the world. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Who on earth would trust the NSA though or any American treaty? Trump doesn't believe in treaties and any future president/congress could just undo it anyway.
Because all the places that made pot legal now have too much pot because no one wanted it anymore, right?
Can we AT LEAST stop using their propaganda term "sharing"? Sharing is an act of generosity. What these bastards are doing is anything but.
Call it selling, hawking, spying, tracking, recording, traffiking -- ANYTHING but "sharing".
Pot is a bad analogy for many reasons.
First there was little reason to ever make it illegal, and it is pleasant to use with few side effects - unlike most illegal drugs. Due to unpleasant side-effects, most would not try other illegal drugs without the marketing of the drug trade establishment. Pot was made illegal by the same type of folks that are always seeking to keep any sex they don't approve of illegal. Sex is another thing that would not reflect the effect I speak of. If fully deregulated, the sex trade would increase.
More importantly, the "legalization" of pot does not in any way provide a test of legalization. It is a fake legalization.
Pot is still highly profitable both because they didn't make it completely legal nationwide and it is heavily "regulated" (i.e. still really illegal) in those places that "legalized" it. For users crossing state lines, the competitors of the shops in those states where it is legal are the pushers in the other states. This plus the restrictions on growing it yourself and giving it to friends for free sustain both a higher price and a marketing system - partly the marketing systems of the drug establishment in those states where it is still fully illegal.
Pot is very comparable to sugar which is far more addictive, a leading cause of depression, and kills far more people (possibly as much as a million a year in the US alone). We barely even regulate sugar.
Yet, unlike sugar, pot is so trivial to produce for yourself that full, consistent, nationwide deregulation would likely cause a collapse or at least great reduction in the businesses improving it and could result in a reduction over time of users, especially the type of folks who are doing it because it is expensive and naughty - the folks who choose what to do on the basis of whether or not it flaunts their money. And even if it didn't reduce users, it would reduce the cost to society by reducing the artificially propped up cost of the product and eliminating the many costs of enforcement.
...because the governments of the world, the USA in particular, are the biggest buyers of illegally gathered personal information. Start a business tracking people in some way and you'll have a guaranteed income stream forever.