In a December 12 exposé occupying two full spreads in Guangzhou's Southern Metropolis Daily, reporters Rao Lidong (饶丽冬) and Li Ling (李玲) carefully documented their successful attempts to obtain personal information about consenting colleagues through "tracking" services advertised online.
For a modest fee of 700 yuan, or about 100 dollars, the reporters were able to obtain an astonishing array of information based on one colleague's personal ID number, including a full history of hotel rooms checked into, airline flights taken, internet cafes visited, border entries and exits, apartment rentals, real estate holdings — even deposit records from the country's four major banks.
But that wasn't all. The reporters were also able to purchase live location data on another colleague's mobile phone, pinpointing their position with disturbing accuracy.
Hundreds of tracking services are advertised on internet-based platforms in China, offering clients the power to unlock, with as little as a phone number or ID, the personal data of just about any Chinese citizen. You can find them on Tencent's WeChat and QQ services, on the Taobao online marketplace and on Weibo. And while some of these services are unreliable or outright fraudulent, others are able to deliver accurate information from what must be national police and government databases, as well as from banks and mobile carriers.
In other words, through a simple mobile transaction, you, too, can be Big Brother.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:18PM
Is it better if we all have the power to be Big Brother? I wish this genie would go back into the lamp, but...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:24PM
Nope. I've met enough humans to know that I wouldn't want many of them to know too much about me or my family.
And I'm not a good-looking woman.
The people with official full access to my data are supposed to have accountability, but there's already too many of them.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday January 20 2017, @08:18AM
and there is virtually no accountability. It generally amounts to "don't let me catch you doing this again" [not "don't do this again"].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:19PM
Nobody wants to spy on me because I'm fat and ugly. I win at last!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:47PM
*** FakeDiet 4000! SPECIAL OFFER Buy now! ****
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:58PM
no, see, that only works for insecure people who crave attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:33PM
while true you were exposed to spam because you gave out information about yourself
which is kinda the crux of this topic
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:58PM
Cheap plastic surgery! Affordable payments!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:06PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:27PM
It's slim odds, but the blackmail potential of finding someone wealthy/powerful who went on a date with a fat, ugly person is enough to make it worthwhile.
Sorry to disappoint.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:36PM
Billionaires all over the world now realize that Moscow is a better choice than Beijing, if you want to keep your extramarital activities hidden from ordinary people...
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Thursday January 19 2017, @11:02PM
As long as your not paying the world's finest(according to Putin) prostitutes to urinate on a bed, apparently. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:42PM
Fat ugly people. Especially if you assume they will have no standards and are desparate.
Or if you want a fatty dom to facesit you (whether male or female.)
And yeah the current information genie is out of the bag. Either the infrastructure and data gets destroyed (hahahaha, unless society rises up), or access to it needs to be leaked so everyone has it, and enhanced scrutiny can be placed upon those who are 'above scrutiny', since they are most likely to abuse it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:45PM
Sounds like the perfect target for junk food advertising.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:13PM
For those of you who only read the summary, the submitter didn't just bury the lede, they left it out.
All of this is enabled by China's "social credit" system which has the government playing the role of credit rating agency on steroids. The government is tracking the shit out of everybody and then corrupt employees are selling access to the government database.
In the US we eliminate corruption by outsourcing the rating to companies which don't even make a pretense of protecting the data, their entire business model is to sell access to it. Problem solved!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:43PM
Same in the United States. Any piece of government data obtainable by law enforcement, like home addresses from drivers licenses, can be obtained by private investigators or anyone with $50.
Our government sells the data too. It just creates a bunch of "scary" bureaucracy around it that makes it sound above board.
If you are willing to pay private contractors, like the credit agencies and information aggregators like LexusNexus, you can get even more. Somehow it's not illegal, unethical, or impossible for Facebook to purchase external information about me, so why does anyone really think it's impossible for Joe Sixpack to do so? It's all about money and access, and money delivers access.
The only solution is Bayesian poisoning and outright civil disobedience. I've never had correct information on any government forms from day one. This election, the first I voted in, had me registered at some cross streets well away from my actual physical location. The most I was willing to give them was being isolated to a zip code. Same with unPatriot Act information demanded of me by banks. None of it accurate, just "accurate" enough to game their approval systems and then changed to appropriate mailing addresses afterwards. Those mailing addresses loopback to the themselves, and the copies of my drivers license loop back to them :)
Unfortunately, that's all we have. Lying. At least we were taught how by the best though..... politicians :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:05AM
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:38PM
You'll never get lost, ever! There's always a nosy bastard looking over your shoulder. If you think you're lost, just turn around and ask the nosy bastard!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @06:24PM
But when you ask the nosy bastards to testify for your defense in court, they refuse. It seems the nosy bastards are only looking to screw you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @06:47AM
It's all OK, nosy Runaway1946 snuggled right into where I needed him, when I needed him, and how I needed him, and he did not care that it was a Chinese prison and there were cameras everywhere. That is what I love about Runaway1966, that and his innate hatred of Muslims, Okies,and people from Louisiana. Rock on, Runaway! Come nose me now!