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Coronavirus: WeChat, Alipay deny helping government identify 350,000 users who visited Beijing food market

  • The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated China’s collection of big data, especially for contact tracing
  • Posts on Weibo claimed that WeChat Pay and Alipay helped identify people who had visited Beijing’s Xinfadi market using their payment data

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Workers in protective suits check the names of people who were either live near the Xinfadi wholesale market or have visited the market in Beijing. Photo: AP
Minghe Hu
Chinese digital payment apps WeChat Pay and Alipay have both denied a claim circulating online that they had provided the government with the user data of 350,000 people who had been to Beijing’s Xinfadi wholesale food market, the centre of the latest coronavirus outbreak in the country.
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In nearly identical statements on microblogging site Weibo, the apps shared screenshots of posts stating that they had helped authorities identify people who had visited the market.

“Alipay and WeChat have done [the country] a great service by quickly identifying 350,000 people,” the posts said, according to the screenshots. “There have been no cash transactions at the market since the start of the epidemic, so Alipay and WeChat were able to easily confirm the people affected, who are all being screened for the virus now.”

Screenshots from Weibo posts by Alipay (left) and WeChat denying that the digital payment apps had helped the government identify users who had visited a Beijing market.
Screenshots from Weibo posts by Alipay (left) and WeChat denying that the digital payment apps had helped the government identify users who had visited a Beijing market.

As of Monday morning, the original posts could not be found on Weibo.

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“Alipay has not provided the data mentioned in the screenshot below,” the digital payments app operated by Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of the Post’s parent company Alibaba Group Holding, wrote in a post on Sunday night. “For information about the epidemic situation, please refer to the official announcements of the health and epidemic prevention authorities.”

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