IN A bid to contain the country’s coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese government has teamed up with tech firms to monitor citizens and track confirmed cases of infection with the covid-19 virus.
On 16 February, Alipay – the world’s largest mobile payments platform – announced that a colour-coded QR phone app to monitor individuals in China would be available within a week.
The app assigns individuals a QR code with a red, yellow or green status based on their travel history and self-reported health. Anyone flagged as red is instructed to remain quarantined for 14 days, and people flagged as yellow for seven days. Authorities can scan an individual’s QR code to log their movements.
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QR codes are also being deployed at travel checkpoints, including . Drivers are required to scan them before their cars are allowed to enter cities, a process that can track the location of people by their Chinese resident identity card number.
On 13 February, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly launched a service with three state-run telecommunications firms – China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile – that allows users to request their location data from the previous 14 days by text message.
70,000
Number of close contacts detected by one state-owned tracking app
Other technologies tap into the Chinese government’s vast collection of citizens’ data to . The Close Contact Detector mobile app, developed by the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), pulls data from national health, aviation and transport authorities. Purchasing train and plane tickets in China requires ID, and the state-owned China Rail has a database of all trips taken since 2000.
Once a user registers with their name, ID card number and phone number, the app flags whether in the previous fortnight the user has lived, worked or travelled with a person confirmed or suspected to have the coronavirus.
The system flags people who have sat within three rows of each other on a plane or in the same air-conditioned train compartment. In the first two days after it was introduced, the app was used 100 million times and detected more than 70,000 close contacts who could have coronavirus, according to the CETC.
State-run apps require a user to input their personal details, but others developed by some Chinese tech firms don’t. The Smart Assistant function on Huawei phones in China, for example, pulls information from Ding Xiang Yuan, or DXY – a website for medical professionals – to let people search by flight number to see if there were any suspected or confirmed cases.
An app in Chinese messaging platform WeChat allows someone in a city to locate the nearest confirmed case registered by Chinese health authorities and the date somebody with coronavirus was last there. Cases are colour-coded red and orange to indicate cases diagnosed within the previous 14 and 28 days, respectively.
The widespread tracking of Chinese citizens raises privacy concerns. The city of Hangzhou has detained or fined nine people for lying about their travel and medical history since the coronavirus outbreak began, and authorities in Shanghai have vowed to take similar measures.
