China’s enforcement agencies have struggled to keep up with an increasingly skilled industrial chain of insiders and data brokers.
When Sharon Liu, a finance professional in the eastern Chinese city of Tianjin, bought a flat through an online brokerage platform late last year, she never agreed to give strangers her personal information. Now, up to three times a day, she receives calls from people she has never met who know her full name and home address.
“We have to acknowledge that [the situation of] Chinese citizens’ personal information leakage and infringement is grim,” said Steve Zhao, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at the Beijing-based Gen law firm. Even though the brokers were arrested for selling the data to telemarketing fraudsters in China and South-East Asia, it is too late to remove victims’ information from the internet once it is disseminated.