Baidu’s CEO has proposed new rules to rein in the collection of sensitive personal information as part of efforts to fight the coronavirus.
Photo: tingshu wang/ReutersChina created a smartphone tool to trace and track the movement of potential coronavirus patients. Now, plans to make that kind of health tracking permanent are stirring concerns in a country where personal privacy was once said to be an afterthought.
Anger spread across Chinese social media sites over the weekend following an announcement that officials in the eastern city of Hangzhou could create a permanent version of a smartphone-based health-rating system developed to fight Covid-19. The news led some internet users to accuse the city of exploiting the pandemic to expand state monitoring of residents.
The controversy came days after Baidu Inc. Chief Executive Robin Li, a member of a Chinese political advisory body currently convening in Beijing as part of the country’s annual legislative conclave, proposed new rules to rein in the collection of sensitive personal information as part of efforts to fight the coronavirus.
Chinese authorities have aggressively touted the deployment of digital surveillance in helping to contain the spread of Covid-19. In addition to tracking potential patients with temperature-detecting cameras and smartphone location data, officials have also used QR code-based health-rating apps to manage the movement of residents depending on their risk of exposure.
Hangzhou, a tech hub located south of Shanghai, was among the first cities to roll out a health-rating app. Developed by authorities with help from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which is based in Hangzhou, the app tracks a person’s travel history and health conditions in order to single out those at a higher risk of carrying the coronavirus.
Residents who had recently traveled to virus hot spots would be given a red bar code and asked to quarantine themselves for 14 days. Those without such a travel history and who were feeling healthy were given a green bar code, and allowed to move freely around the city.
On Friday, the city’s health commission said it was considering a new, permanent version of the tool that would assign each person a colored health badge based on a collation of their medical records, physical examination results and lifestyle habits, such as smoking and alcohol consumption.
In addition to the colored badge, each resident would be assigned a health score ranging from 0 to 100, which a city would use to compile health rankings, Hangzhou health commission chief Sun Yongrong said, according to the commission’s website.
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“At the same time, we can use big data to rate group health in apartment buildings, residential communities and businesses,” Ms. Sun said.
The plan generated a wave of criticism on Weibo, China’s analog of Twitter. “Once power is unleashed, it’s difficult to retract. Once we give up our rights under special circumstances, it’s hard to get them back,” one user wrote in a widely circulated post Monday.
Several Weibo users likened the plan to something out of “Black Mirror,” a popular British dystopian science fiction television series about the unexpected results of new technology.
Hangzhou’s health commission didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Mr. Li, the Baidu CEO, submitted a formal but nonbinding proposal to legislators to wind down data-collection measures it had put in place while trying to control the coronavirus. The proposal, a copy of which Baidu provided to The Wall Street Journal, called for clear rules to manage data already collected in order to minimize the risk of information leakage and abuse.
The executive set off his own controversy in 2018, when he said at a high-level forum in Beijing that Chinese people are willing to “trade privacy for convenience, for safety, for efficiency,” though he later said Baidu only used personal data that users had agreed to provide.
A survey published earlier this month by the state-linked Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese Academy of Sciences found widespread public concern over the promotion of enhanced facial-recognition technologies that tech companies say can identify people when wearing face masks.
Nine out of 10 respondents said they should be entitled to be informed about who is collecting their facial data in privately owned places such as offices and buildings, according to the survey. While a majority supported the use of the technology during the pandemic, 82% said they thought facial data should be deleted once it is over.
The survey polled roughly 1,100 people from 11 countries, although 85% were Chinese, according to the researchers.
Concerns about privacy have been growing in China, particularly among residents of wealthier cities, as Chinese companies and government agencies seek to collect ever-greater troves of data.
In a report delivered at the annual meeting of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, chief lawmaker Li Zhanshu said Monday that the government would push forward with efforts to pass a personal data-protection law as part of efforts to improve “national security and social governance.”
The safeguarding of personal information in China currently falls under a mishmash of cybersecurity, consumer protection and other regulations. A collection of national security laws supersedes those rules, obligating internet companies to grant the government access to a broad swath of “important data” that touches on national or public interests.
Lawmakers recently completed a new draft of the personal-data protection law, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on May 14. Efforts to craft an overarching law to protect personal information have been under way for well over a decade.
Clement Chen, a legal scholar at the University of Hong Kong, said passing the law could help reassure the Chinese public about the safety of personal data collected by government agencies and companies.
“Existing laws are either too general or they don’t thoroughly cover all types of personal data,” he said. “There’s a need for a more comprehensive and operable law to provide protection.”
—Raffaele Huang contributed to this article.
Write to Liza Lin at Liza.Lin@wsj.com
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