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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-cost-of-running-a-go-to dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:43PM

    by edIII (791) on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:43PM (#456175)

    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 :)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @03:05AM (#456351)
    Now you're vulnerable the instant anyone wants to make an example of you. http://www.wisenberglaw.com/Articles/How-to-Avoid-Going-to-Jail-under-18-U-S-C-Section-1001-for-Lying-to-Government-Agents.shtml [wisenberglaw.com] is something to read and weep over.