As the burgeoning technological and manufacturing sectors in China fuel an economic boom, the growing middle class within the nation is rapidly adopting a variety of technologies. However, even as Chinese technologies race ahead of American progress, their developers and distributors are guided by the hand of an authoritarian government. Historically, individual privacy protections within China when it comes to technological advances have been practically nonexistent, lapsing behind the inadequacy and technological illiteracy of US policymakers into explicitly politically-motivated restrictions on technological use and implementation. One well-known example of this is China’s infamous so-called “Great Firewall of China”, which restricts internet access across the nation. During times of conflict and public dissent, when social media usage by protesters cannot be contained, access to the entire internet within a region may be blocked off. Less dramatic than this is the constant filtering of Chinese internet and social media functions. Topics that the Chinese authoritarian government does not want people talking about or searching for yield no search results on the internet and cannot be posted on social media. These topics go from the obviously political (for example, the famous photographs of the tragedy in Tienanmen square) to the seemingly benign (content relating to Winnie the Pooh hs been blocked after people started pointing out that Chinese president Xi Jinping supposedly looks like the cartoon bear). Disobeying these protocols in China has real-world consequences, as the nation arrests thousands of people each year for “internet crimes” and puts them in prisons and detention camps that the outside world knows very little about. During the first 10 months of 2019, for example, the Chinese government arrested 60,000 suspects on charges of internet crimes as part of a renewed campaign to clean up its internet. Another example of a newly developing arena of Chinese government use of the internet to control the behavior of the masses is the social credit system it has been experimenting with and slowly implementing across regions of the country. Such systems assign scores relating to an individual’s trustworthiness and respectability by measuring a variety of social and legal infractions, such as traffic violations.

All this demonstrates the way China’s government is unafraid to explicitly shape and direct the internet. So when the question of big data and individual privacy is raised, it’s no surprise that the Chinese government handles vast quantities of personal data directly. Just as there is no cultural expectation of a free internet, there is also no cultural expectation of individual privacy.

The use of big data to track diseases is a promising arena of future data use. In fact, it’s already implemented all over the world in several ways; American health authorities, for example, watch Google trends to see who is searching for symptoms of a particular disease in order to map its spread. However, the government ideally does not have the individual, identified information of each person in such a situation. Instead, the goal is differential privacy: looking at a corpus of data for patterns without connecting them to individuals. Though it might seem like a situation like an alarming epidemic might make this privacy less of a priority, there are benefits to differential privacy even in such situations. For example, the United States frequently conceals the identities of victims of high-profile diseases simply to the general metropolitan area they live in. There are many reasons for this, one being the simple truth that making individuals identifiable under media scrutiny creates an environment in which other victims may hesitate to report their illness and be subjected to similar scrutiny.

With all this context, it likely comes as no surprise that China has not made differential privacy its first priority in using data to try to model the spread of the current coronavirus outbreak, COVID-19. In some parts of China, citizens buying fever and cough medications currently have to register with their real names to allow for authorities to follow up with them about their illness. In other parts, full names are required to board the subway. Verifying one’s identity by scanning a QR code is now required for buses, trains, and taxis across much of the country. These sorts of developments make it much easier to pinpoint who is spreading the disease, where hotspots are developing, and who may be attempting to disobey quarantine orders. However, it’s jarring to consider the way the government knows one’s approximate whereabouts at all times in China in such a system, especially when one considers the slim likelihood that such a system would be dismantled entirely after the outbreak. The epidemic seems to be an excuse, according to some, for the government to collect even more data from citizens, barring them transport if they refuse to comply. This data, combined with the information they already have on all citizens, creates an unsettling corpus.

How would people respond to a similar outbreak in the US? There might be more resistance due to a cultural expectation of freedom. However, US data collection, though far behind China’s transgressions, is a topic of fierce legislative power, weighed down by much misunderstanding. How might the US handle a situation like this? What are China’s motives with this development?

Sources cited in this post:

https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3052232/coronavirus-accelerates-chinas-big-data-collection-privacy

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201911/15/WS5dcdf2ada310cf3e3557777c.html