Personal information collected to fight Covid-19 is being spread online in China

Aggressive data collection during the pandemic has led to rampant data leaks on WeChat

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People use QR codes required to prove their health and travel status before being allowed to enter a shopping mall in Beijing on May 2, the second day of a five-day national holiday. (Picture: AFP)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 9:27pm, 12 May 2020Updated: 9:27pm, 12 May 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

When the data leaks started, people from Wuhan were the first victims. But now people across China are grappling with whether the personal information they surrendered to fight the pandemic is being well protected.

Around the time of the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, many people traveling back to their hometowns from Wuhan were receiving less-than-friendly phone calls and WeChat messages from strangers. Some angrily told them to return to the virus-stricken city. Others asked if they had been eating wild animals, an unconfirmed theory about how the deadly coronavirus first reached humans.

This harassment was the result of wide-ranging doxxing online, with personal information being shared in spreadsheets passed around in WeChat groups, according to Chinese media reports. The data included real names, national ID numbers, phone numbers and home addresses, resulting in spam calls and online harassment.

The victims’ only sin was living in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. Before the city was locked down on January 23, 5 million people left the city to go home for the holiday or because of the epidemic.

In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, people from Hubei province, where Wuhan is the capital, faced widespread discrimination. But data collection would soon become the default method of combating the spread of the coronavirus as local governments and organizations sought to track who was going where. Soon enough, data leaks were affecting a lot more people than just those from Wuhan.