Growing public unease over China's surveillance and security apparatus
China's surveillance state has encountered rare resistance from its own subjects as there is growing public unease over its security apparatus. Amy Qin, John Liu and Amy Chang Chien, writing in The New York Times (NYT) said that Chinese artists have staged performances to highlight the ubiquity of surveillance cameras.
Privacy activists have filed lawsuits against the collection of facial recognition data. Ordinary citizens and establishment intellectuals alike have pushed back against the abuse of Covid tracking apps by the authorities to curb protests. Internet users have shared tips on how to evade digital monitoring.
The unease is about the lack of safeguards to prevent the theft or misuse of personal data.
Recently, the ruling Communist Party, last week, moved systematically to squelch news about what was probably the largest known breach of a Chinese government computer system, involving the personal information of as many as one billion citizens.
The breach dealt a blow to Beijing, exposing the risks of its expansive efforts to vacuum up enormous amounts of digital and biological information on the daily activities and social connections of its people from social media posts, biometric data, phone records and surveillance videos, said Amy Qin, John Liu and Amy Chang.
However, the Chinese government defended itself and said that these efforts are necessary for public safety: to limit the spread of Covid, for instance, or to catch criminals.
But its failure to protect the data exposes citizens to problems like fraud and extortion, and threatens to erode people's willingness to comply with surveillance, reported NYT.
"You never know who is going to sell or leak your information," said Jewel Liao, a Shanghai
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