Faced with the discontent of the population, China is letting go of the surveillance and control of the movements of citizens. From Tuesday, the application that tracks the entries and exits of residents in each city or province will be disconnected.
Faced with demonstrations and general discontent from the population, the Chinese state has decided to review, or rather to relax, its anti-Covid policy. Supporter of a “zero Covid” strategy for two and a half years, China had opted for massive surveillance and population control tools with a applicationapplication of “policing” movements. From Tuesday, midnight, this ” route map » (itinerary cardin English), managed by the State, will be disconnected, and it will be the first in two years.
This application made it possible to know if a person had been to a high-risk area thanks to the demarcationdemarcation from his phone. More precisely, this application included a four-level system that assigned different colorscolors (green, orange and red) depending on the level of exposure of users to Covid. Initially, the follow-up period was 14 days, then China cut it in half to seven days. From Tuesday, the Chinese will no longer have to present their smartphone when traveling.
What about the personal data collected?
On the side of the population, we were obviously pleased with this decision, and the social networkssocial networks were overrun with screenshots of app uninstallation. But surveillance is not completely over since other applications linked to the anti-Covid-19 policy remain mandatory, and one question remains: the protection of personal data collected for two years.
Even if the surveillance had been reduced from 14 to 7 days, it is not known what China did with the billions of data collected over two years. They are all linked to a telephone number, and make it possible to trace the comings and goings of each citizen.
How does the application against Covid-19 work in China?
While France plans to have a contact tracing application, here is how the one that is deployed in many cities in China works.
Posted on April 16, 2020 by Louis Neveu
While in France the development of a StopCovid application to monitor infected people patinapatina and is at the same time controversial, it has been used for several weeks in certain countries, such as South Korea, Singapore, in Moscow in Russia, or even in Germany at the beginning of the month and in the first place, China. In the Middle Kingdom, tracing is done from an application that displays a code colorful QR. Presenting it is even an obligation in many cities. It is the sesame that allows you to leave the house, to take public transport to work, to enter businesses and to travel from one province or city to another.
The principle is very simple. A QR code is generated from the user’s personal information, including the number of identity card, passport. He must also fill in his travel history and if he has come into contact with patients who may have had Covid-19 in the last 14 days. It is also necessary to select the existence of possible symptoms that may suggest the disease. Once the information has been verified by the authorities, each user is assigned a QR code. This is displayed in red, orange or green on the mobile.
Persons with a red code must remain in quarantine for 14 days. The codescodes orange are confined for seven days. Greens can move freely. Depending on the region, the color system is more or less restrictive. For example, in Hubei province, once a person is registered in the database, if he or she has the symptomssymptoms of a virus, the closest people all receive a code orange prohibiting them from traveling in the province.
A permanent flicker
After their launch, the QR codes were adopted in less than a week in 100 cities across the country. At the end of February the number of cities doubled, then tripled at the end of March. In addition to the QR code, in early March Beijing added facial recognition to authenticate the bearer of the code.
The concern with these color assignments is that they wrongly impose quarantine on people who have sometimes indicated mild symptoms, having nothing to do with the virus, such as fatigue, for example. Some cities like Hangzou have made it possible to correct the situation with the possibility of rectifying the data online. The other concern is that many cities and provinces do not use the same national database, but local one. For once, QR codes are not necessarily usable from one region to another. Likewise, restrictions may differ from place to place.
In China too, the thorny question of the protection of personal data arises. The databases have recorded a lot of private information, movements, recent contacts, state of health. A subject that concerns the Chinese as much as the other populations concerned by this type of application. The problem always remains the same: what about these data when the crisis is over? Suffice to say that even after having undergone several months theepidemicepidemicChina still struggles to tune its violins.
