Hey there. It’s Brady.
Once, years ago, an editor based in New York told me that the overarching sentiment in many newsrooms in the United States is that people in China don’t care about their privacy. With so much surveillance that goes on, the logic went, why would they bother?
At the time, I could see the reason in this line of thinking, and I had even encountered people in China who had expressed that exact sentiment. But it still felt wrong, because most of us are wired to appreciate some space that is our own.
I bring this up because even in the context of our electronic interactions leaving indelible imprints every time we send a message, or visit a webpage, or like a post, or even just carry our phones, someone somewhere is logging that information and using it as a resource for profit.
New regulations kicked in last week to govern these processes in China. Naturally, the country’s most popular apps are under scrutiny. Some have more than 1 billion active users, like Alipay, which has made its privacy policy more interactive and clearer than before, so people who utilize it for their daily payments know where their data goes and how it is processed.
Are new regulations and slightly more engagement and transparency from tech companies enough to satisfy the public’s expectations about data privacy and protection? That isn’t clear for now, but it’s a first step.
Jiaxing wrote about these developments in the context of changes in Alipay’s app. You can read about them here.
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