China is making plans to launch a national virtual ID, and in some ways it’s unexpected that it’s taken this long. Beijing’s tight control over the media and its powerful formula of public surveillance are no secret. Beyond the aforementioned Great Firewall, Chinese Internet users will already have to provide an identifier and a phone number to log in to popular platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. While the government claims that a virtual ID formula would protect online privacy, many claim that virtual ID would only strengthen and centralize government control over other people and their data.
Articles in the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the South China Morning Post underscore those concerns.
The New York Times claims that implementing a national virtual ID would make the government take on the task of verifying the identities of third parties. He says the proposal is for the formula to be voluntary and for the government to collect public opinion until the end of August (via www. moj. gov. cn and www. chinalaw. gov. cn). But academics and jurists worry that it could be used simply as a tool of social control.
The article quotes Rose Luqiu, an assistant professor of journalism at Hong Kong Baptist University, who says, “With this web ID, each and every one of your online movements, all your virtual traces, will be monitored through regulators. This will definitely have an effect on people’s behavior.
The Financial Times notes that the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in collaboration with the country’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS), has published draft regulations for the initiative. He cites Tom Nunlist, associate director at Chinese consulting firm Trivium, who believes such a centralized national identity would mean a trade-off between privacy commitments, as it would be harder for corporations to track visitors’ habits and for police to monitor them. The same.
Some say police can’t be trusted to protect a lot of non-public information, pointing to a huge knowledge gap in 2022 in which hackers stole “a lot of non-public knowledge” that police from Shanghai had been exposed online. Nunlist notes that the Chinese population is concerned about the protection of knowledge. “There’s a misconception that the Chinese care less about their privacy and state intrusion than other places,” he says. “The concern about this rule update is a pretty strong demonstration that that is not the case. ”
SCMP reports that the draft “Measures for the Management of the Public Service of Identity Authentication in the National Network” includes 16 articles and describes two virtual identity bureaucracies that would be obtained through a national authentication application.
He quotes Shen Kui, a law professor at Peking University, who says that a unified network identity can simply simplify authentication for online transactions and decrease the misuse of non-public data. “The fewer entities that collect genuine identifiable data, the less likely they will be asked to provide non-public data beyond the necessary scope,” he says.
But, in a separate post posted on the WeChat account of the university’s Center for Constitutional and Administrative Law, Shen points out that unified and centralized national surveillance formulas naturally tend to make other people nervous. As such, national virtual ID may simply have a chilling effect on online freedom, due to fear of widespread state surveillance. “The dynamism of the virtual economy and Internet society is based on a multicentric formula and not on centralized monopolies,” he writes.
Shen also doubts that the voluntary virtual identity program will last long.
For its part, the state-run Xinhua news agency states that the project “clearly establishes the precept of ‘minimum and necessity’ for data collected through the cyberspace identity public service platform, and specifies the obligations of the platform in terms of explanation, notification” and knowledge coverage in the processing of user data.
CSO Online’s policy goes a little further than the two identification bureaucracies: one is “a series of letters and numbers” and the other an online identifier, “both corresponding to an individual’s genuine identity, but any data in plain text. » Presents studies by Manish Jain, senior director of research at Info-Tech Research Group, who compares China’s draft proposal with India’s Aadhaar system.
“China offers national virtual identity in three forms: an alphanumeric identifier, an identity certificate, and online credentials,” Jain says. “This technique is similar to that of other countries such as Estonia, which use eID, Smart ID and Mobile ID. However, it differs from the Indian system, which was designed for a population of similar size, in which Aadhaar serves as an identifier and virtual card. For online transactions, Aadhaar relies on one-time passwords sent to registered cell phones, which strengthens its security.
It also notes that India has created a separate statutory authority under the provisions of the Aadhaar Act of 2016 to regulate virtual identification, thereby reducing the threat of centralization of knowledge through the government of the day.
China | Privacy of Knowledge | Knowledge Coverage | Virtual Identity | Virtual Identity | Regulation | Listen to me
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