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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: 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.