Chinese Big Brother collecting big data — and it's all for sale

China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level, says The Citizen Lab at University of Toronto
By Saša Petricic

Cameras in Beijing: Big Brother doesn't even need to be watching with his own eyes.

Living in China, it's safe to assume pretty much everything about you is known — or easily can be known — by the government.
Where you go, who you're with, which restaurants you like, when and why you see your doctor.
Big Brother doesn't even need to be watching with his own eyes.
There is an entire network — the internet inside China's Great Firewall — designed to gather the information. 
And there's an industry of private and state-owned high-tech enterprises serving it.
"You could go so far as to make the argument that social media and digital technology are actually supporting the regime," says Ronald Deibert, the director of The Citizen Lab, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto who study how information technology affects human and personal rights around the world.

Ronald Deibert, of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, says Chinese authorities 'have a wealth of data at their disposal about what individuals are doing at a micro level in ways that they never had before.' 

The lab has taken apart popular apps like WeChat, a messaging app that also does financial transactions designed specifically for the Chinese market by private software giant Tencent.
It's used by more than 800 million people here every month — virtually every Chinese person who is online.
Deibert's team found it contains various hidden means of censorship and surveillance. 
Among other things, the restrictions follow Chinese students who study abroad.
Chinese authorities "have a wealth of data at their disposal about what individuals are doing at a micro level in ways that they never had before," Deibert says.
"What the government has managed to do is download the controls to the private sector, to make it incumbent upon them to police their own networks," he says.

A cyclist in Beijing checks his smartphone. Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score. 

And now the data these firms collect is for sale.
An investigation by a leading Chinese newspaper, the Guangzhou Southern Metropolis Daily, found that just a little cash could buy incredible amounts of information about almost anyone.
Friend or fiancé, business competitor or enemy … no questions asked.
Using just the personal ID number of a colleague, reporters bought detailed data about hotels stayed at, flights and trains taken, border entry and exit records, real estate transactions and bank records. 
All of them with dates, times and scans of documents (for an extra fee, the seller could provide the names of who the colleague stayed with at hotels and rented apartments).
All confirmed by the colleague. 
And all for the low price of 700 yuan, or about $140 Cdn.

In a system where every citizen's information is collected and traded at every level, involving government officials and private corporations, it's hard to tell who isn't allowed to know.

Another service provided live tracking of a colleague using his mobile phone, sending pinpoint locations in real time.
This too was surprisingly accurate.
There are countless ads for services like these online, and some seem more reliable than others.
But the reporters at the Southern Metropolis Daily had no trouble getting solid, confirmed information.
Much of the data seems to come from companies like telecom providers and hotels. 
But some is likely only available from government sources, information on driving infractions and border crossings.
In all cases, it seems the data is routinely collected, sorted and cross-referenced — and almost certainly tracked by government officials.
In fact, Beijing recently unveiled an ambitious plan to assign every citizen a so-called "social credit" score. 
Modeled on the score banking institutions give for your financial reliability, this one would measure your social "trustworthiness" using data collected from every online interaction.

Data free-for-all
Every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction or incident of rowdiness would go into a central database that would spit out a single number that would determine how far you could be trusted to hold a job or travel or even get married.
That raises the question, would that massive database also be publicly available?
The approach is a far cry from what many Western governments still consider an appropriate balance between privacy and "national security," the vague catch-all phrase that China's Communist leaders use to justify crackdowns against anything that they consider politically threatening.
"I would say it's a very big issue," says The Citizen Lab's Deibert.
"It is in contrast to the data minimization philosophy – collect only what you need and keep it for only as long as you need to use it, then delete, delete, delete."
Technically, privacy is protected by the constitution and the law in China, but when the Southern Metropolis Daily contacted the police with the results of its investigation, there was no comment.
In a system where every citizen's information is collected and traded at every level — in an apparent data free-for-all that involves government officials as well as so many private corporations — it's hard to tell who isn't allowed to know.

China is censoring people’s chats without their even knowing about it

By Josh Horwitz

China’s WeChat originated as a WhatsApp clone, but later evolved into the single-most important tool for connecting people in China. 

Yet it’s never been clear exactly how China’s internet censors have attempted to control information that spreads in the app. 

That’s partly because you likely wouldn’t know if you got censored in the first place.
A new study from The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, reveals that censorship on WeChat occurs primarily in group chats rather than one-on-one chats between two people, and often in such a way where the sender of a text isn’t even aware a piece of text has been scrubbed. 

The discoveries illuminates how China’s government attempts to keep its citizens blind to the scope of its censorship regime.
The researchers set out find the extent to which certain keywords got scrubbed from conversations between two or more users in WeChat. 

To do this, in June 2016 the team posed as a Chinese WeChat user and sent out 26,821 keywords containing terms that had been censored on other apps, like Sina Weibo or YY. 

A corresponding Canadian user in the two-way chat would then report back to say whether or not the message had been received.
The report states that out of the entire sample, only one term—Falun Gong 法轮功—had been scrubbed. 

When they ran an identical test in August, even that text mysteriously passed without censorship.
Yet when they tested group chats, they found multiple cases in which certain keywords triggered a removal. 

Specifically, while sensitive terms used in isolation were unlikely to trigger censorship (say “June 4th,” a reference to the Tiananmen Square protests, brutally put down on June 4, 1989), it took effect when they were used in a full sentence or with other keywords.
The researchers also discovered that when WeChat censored a message, the sender received no notice informing him that his text had not reached the intended recipient.

Sample screenshots show that Chinese users could not successfully send out texts reading “June 4th Student Democracy Movement” and “My birthday is June 4th. I am a student. I am reading a book about democracy movements.”Photo prise par: (The Citizen Lab)

Jason Q. Ng, research fellow at The Citizen Lab, speculates that either the government, or WeChat, or both parties have singled out group chats rather than one-to-one chats because they are more likely to help users mobilize politically. 

There have been several cases in which people used WeChat group chats to plan gatherings. 

Last June, for example, four people were arrested for using the service to protest the building of a waste incineration plant in Ningxia, Hunan.
“The size of the audience matters for a lot because as the audience increases you have the potential for greater spillover to actual moblization on the streets,” says Ng. 

“The fact that you can reach out to more people than just a single person makes it more risky that it could go viral or provoke street protests.”
The researchers also discovered that WeChat only censors content for users who bind their account to a mainland Chinese phone number when they first register to use the app. 

As a result, it primarily affects mainland Chinese residents. 

However, if they move outside China or change their phone numbers—for instance, Chinese students studying abroad—they are still subjected to the same censorship.