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 says a virtual identity formula would protect online privacy, many virtual IDs 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 have the government take over third-party identity verification. He says the proposal aims to make the formula voluntary and for the government to collect public comments by the end of August (through www. moj. gov. cn and www. chinalaw. gov. cn). But academics and lawyers 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 quotes Tom Nunlist, associate director of Chinese consultancy 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 Shanghai police had left exposed online. Nunlist notes that the Chinese population is concerned about the protection of knowledge. “There’s a misconception that Chinese people 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’s not the case. “
SCMP reports that the draft “Management Measures of the National Network Identity Authentication Public Service” includes 16 articles and outlines 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 it is that you will be required to provide non-public data beyond the necessary scope,” he says.
But, in a separate article published 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 have a tendency to make other people nervous. As such, the national virtual ID can have a chilling effect on online freedom, due to the fear of general state surveillance. “The dynamism of the virtual economy and the Internet society is based on a multicentric formula and not on centralized monopolies,” he writes.
Shen also doubts that the voluntary virtual ID program will remain that way for long.
For its part, the state news agency Xinhua states that the project “clearly establishes the ‘minimum and necessity’ precept for data collected through the cyberspace public identity 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 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 a virtual identifier. and map. For online transactions, Aadhaar relies on one-time passwords sent to registered cell phones, editing their security.
It also notes that India has created a separate statutory authority under the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 to regulate virtual identification, 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
Dublin-based customer credit insights and analytics company Experian has acquired US-based behavioral analytics company NeuroID, securing a US edition of NeuroID. . .
In an effort to achieve greater service delivery and inclusive economic growth, emerging countries are adopting Fundamental Identity Systems (FIDS).
Microsoft has announced that Face Check is now available to the public as a component of Entra Verified ID. Identity Verification. . .
Las Vegas police say NFL has forgotten Las Vegas’ golden rule of discretion and threatens to boycott. . .
India is expanding its virtual public infrastructure to the agricultural sector with its 2024-2025 budget and is running to bring the DPI. . .
Veriff’s new Deepfakes Deep Dive report is the latest to sound the alarm about the risk of deepfakes and. . .
Continue reading