6 Moments When China’s Internet Privacy Creeped Us Out

Alibaba was in a little trouble last week.

On Jan 3^rd, Alipay launched its Annual User Footprint Report that analyzes how consumers have spent their money over the past year. Within a few hours, everyone was sharing screenshots of their own report on WeChat Moments, comparing their consumer keywords - a personalized label endowed by Alipay’s algorithms (for instance, if you bought lingerie on Taobao last year, your keyword would probably be “sexy”. If you used Alipay to pay for Ofo or Mobike rides frequently, you'd be “athletic” by big data standard). The overall mood was very cheerful: it was only three days into the new year, and what’s a better way to celebrate and self-entertain in today's China than showing off your purchasing power?

Alibaba's annual report compares one's spending with everyone else in the city.

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The individualized keywords at the end of the report went viral on Chinese social media. 

Such joy nonetheless was soon disturbed by a lawyer’s Weibo, which warned people about a tiny button checked by default on the report’s landing page (see below). By agreeing it automatically, users were allowing Sesame Credit, the credit scoring system of Ant Financial, to collect, analyze their personal data and share with third-party institutions. While many people were still busy showing off their bills, others were outraged and began to accuse Alipay for infringement of their privacy. The next day, both Sesame Credit and Alipay apologized, cancelling the default option and allowing those already enrolled to deselect the service in the app.

Left: Laywer Yue's weibo. Right: The checked-by-default licensing agreement. 

The incident got us thinking. As two Chinese consumers living in Beijing, we personally experienced the country’s dramatic internet development over the past few years. We absolutely loved and celebrated it fanatically as every Chinese did, yet in a number of occasions, we were also discomforted and even creeped out by China’s now knowing-you-too-much internet. Those were such small and subtle moments – in most cases, we were not even bothered to feel annoyed, generously allowing the joy of convenience overwhelming our consciousness minds. But the truth is these moments do matter, and now is time to dig them out and let the uneasiness sink in.

1.When Taobao knows what you want before you want it.

On the landing page of Taobao’s mobile app hangs a section called “有好货 the Good Things”, which recommends products to users based on their individual shopping history. It’s a thing that every e-commerce stores do nowadays: yelling “I KNOW YA!!” to the consumer's face, shamelessly turning out 10 more USB cables after you purchased the only one you needed (Hey Amazon!).

The Taobao entrance of endless hand-chopping desires.

E-commerce algorithms are aggressive in nature, but Taobao is going a bit too far. Once I searched “skiing” on Weibo to look for a certain snow athlete, a minute later when I opened Taobao, the "有好货 the Good Things" section was already filled with skiing equipment and snow gears. Even creepier was after I took a photo of some blueberries and saved it to album, Taobao’s search engine immediately suggested “blueberry” as a key word.

I wasn’t planning to buy any blueberries, but a click into that damn keyword led me into a whirlwind world of fresh/frozen/dried/important/local blueberries from 10,000+ Taobao shops. I was totally lost. I eventually bought a box of “fresh Brazil important top-quality” blueberries.

When you were in a blueberry wonderland and didn't even know you wanted blueberries...

2.When cashless life comes with a price.

Over the past few years, Alipay and WeChat Pay have been competing fiercely for market share by expanding into every corner of our lives. Every time you need to pay for something, from buying freshly pressed orange juices from a vending machine to paying parking fee, all you need to do is to take out your phone, scan that QR code (through Alipay or WeChat), wait for a few seconds, and voila!

But the magical voila comes with baggage. Sometimes it is having to subscribe to random business accounts that bomb you with ads and personalized greeting messages on your already information-loaded WeChat, sometimes it is having to bond personal information such as your license plate to your WeChat account. When Yan and I was leaving a shopping mall once, the concierge staff said we could enjoy free parking as along as we both follow the mall’s WeChat account, submit our phone numbers and then pay through WeChat. We hesitated for a moment, yet eventually gave in since we were too tired to find an ATM machine for that damn 30 RMB parking fee.

We get it, every short-term convenience in life comes with long-term price. But no, we jut couldn't stop giving in.

3.When you accidentally know too much about your friends.

Yep, this is the eternal trap of today’s social-is-immortal internet. In the case of the Chinese internet and Chinese apps, two things made us felt extra trapped:

a) When Dianping keeps telling you where your friends have been.

Long gone the days when Dianping was still “the Chinese Yelp”. Today, every Chinese person uses Dianping for every stage of a consumer experience, from choosing a restaurant(or a cafe/ spa/cinema and more), reserving a table to getting a discount code, ordering and checking out. Dianping is awesome, Dianping is useful, but Dianping, just like all the other Chinese apps, fears itself to be not social enough: today, as soon as you connect Dianping with WeChat (which is what most people do), you’d immediately be attacked with check-ins, reviews and photos from your WeChat friends right on the app's landing page.

Let’s face it: most of our WeChat “friends” are not really friends anyway, and who cares if that guy visited that famous boutique coffee shop with that beautifully-made latte?! (nope, we DON’T care!)

Too much information, too much...

b) When WeRun refuses to shut up reporting your daily steps.

For one thing, I know so many people who absolutely love WeRun, a pedometer program that ranks the daily steps of all your WeChat contacts. Before Beijng’s weather got unbearably freezing, my mom would religiously walk over 10,000 steps every day, shaking her phone (there are now even automated phone shakers on Taobao for those who prefer to cheat) while constantly checking how many more steps she had progressed. I was glad to see her becoming so athletic until one day, when I heard a conversation between my mom and her friends -

- “Oh darling, you look so fit now! Those WeRun steps of you for sure helped!”

- “Thanks honey! Your (steps) ranking has been pretty high too! I remember giving you likes for so many days!”  (After completing her daily 10,000 steps, my mom would like those who also completed 10,000 steps, and most of them would like back too. )

- “Oh no, I’ve not been so good! Your ranking has been way better, I admire you so much!”

WeRun cheaters/phone shakers on Taobao.

I see how the competitive + social element has made this WeChat walking game extra fun for many people , at the same time, it troubles those of us who prefer to stay idle and not to care about that runner friend who keeps achieving more than 20,000 steps every day. Life is tough enough, now WeChat is not even letting us to be lazy. Ridiculous! Unbearable! ( *Trump tweet tone)

4. When every bit of your personal information is bare out on that take-out invoice stapled to the paper bag.

From a Meituan food delivery yesterday: the smudged part shows my full address, my entire phone number and my name. 

5. When you contact a real-estate agency and all the other agencies in Beijing know what you were looking for.

Last week, Yan and I were online searching for a new office space in Beijing. We saw a pretty decent one on Ganji (a classified advertisement platform like craigslist), called the listed agency, and learned the space was too big to our liking. Since we were not in a hurry to move, we decided to dropped the office-hunting agenda and try another day.

But dropping it turn out to be impossible. After we called for that particular office, I’ve been receiving texts and calls from four other real-estate agencies in the city, each recommending specific spaces based exactly on my requests. I did not register my information anywhere, so where on earth did they learn what I need? Well, according to one of the agents who called, inquiries like mine were "shared information" that everyone in the industry has access to. 

Now tell me if this is not creepy enough.

6.When your message mysteriously disappears on WeChat.

On July 13rd 2017, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel-award Chinese intellectual who was jailed for his pro-democracy activism, passed away in prison.

The moment Yan and I learned about Liu’s death, we just boarded the high-bullet train for a work trip to Shanghai. We bowed our heads down to Weibo and WeChat for the entire train journey, witnessing grieving messages popping up and being scrubbed away in just a few hours’ time. Most people who spoke up knew their posts wouldn’t survive long, but they still talked and mourned, posting candles, pictures and poems in memory of Liu’s life. When Yan and I arrived Shanghai later in the evening, censorship on Liu had went into overdrive. The candle emoji disappeared on Weibo, and every trace of news on his death was smudged away.

People comemorating Liu's death. (Photo from: Quartz)

But things did not just stop there. Eventually, censorship reached into private WeChat messages, operating different filtering mechanism between Chinese and oversea-registered accounts. We asked a friend to send a comic consisting of Liu and his wife, drawn by exiled artist Badiucao, to us separately, and were haunted by what then happened: that photo was received from my end since my WeChat account was registered with a U.S phone number; on Yan’s WeChat however, it never showed despite a confirmed sent from our friend.

The picture that never got through.