Shanghai Roadway Breach and Identity Protection in China

The WSJ reported in March that a company in Beijing had been accused of identity theft at a very large scale.

Commercial information provider Dun & Bradstreet Corp. said it suspended the operations of a China-based business pending an investigation into whether it violated local consumer-privacy laws, and it is also looking into whether employees there violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The business involved, Shanghai Roadway D&B Marketing Services Co., is a direct marketer that helps marketers reach customers through its database.

[…]

Dun & Bradsheet’s disclosure follows a report last week by state-controlled China Central Television that alleged the operation improperly collected private data on 150 million consumers. The report couldn’t be independently confirmed. It was broadcast on Thursday as part of China’s observance of World Consumer-Rights Day.

According to Paul McKenzie, managing partner at law firm Morrison & Foerster’s Beijing office, Chinese law provides its citizen with a broad right to privacy, even though “relative to other countries China has a relatively undeveloped privacy law infrastructure.”

According to Chinese criminal law, it is illegal for employees of government institutions or any private agency in a sector specified by the law with access to personal data, such as health care, education or telecommunications, to sell that data to a third party. Depending on the circumstances, the person buying the data could also be criminally liable.

You might think of this as a great sign. Identity information is being protected in China, which should help the market by reducing fraud.

CNN, however, argues a completely different perspective in a report. They say outsiders are uncomfortable with privacy for the Chinese as it makes investment more risky.

Beijing has clamped down on information once publicly available on listed and state-owned companies, hurting the effort of Western investors and companies to gauge whether to invest in — or short-sell — Chinese firms.

[…]

“This is a handicap to people investing in China right now. It is linked to the political atmosphere of this year’s leadership transition period, which has made China more tense, and the gathering of legitimate business information more sensitive” [said Peter Humphrey, managing director of ChinaWhys, an international business risk advisory firm in Beijing]

The move to limit public information on companies comes after the April arrest of 1,700 suspects in a widespread crackdown on the illegal selling of personal information, the Shanghai Daily reported, including an official in Baoding who sold large amounts registered company information.

Interesting angle on the topic of transparency. The question that CNN does not bring up or try to answer is when and how people should trust their identity information to foreign investors and, more importantly, whether they should be able to decide how their identity information is collected and shared. They skirt around the central issue: at what point does “gathering of legitimate business information” become “improperly collected private data”.

Death Threat Fraud SMS in Australia

Newspapers in Australia, such as the Sunshine Coast Daily, are reporting a massive fraud scheme using SMS messages

The Federal Government’s SCAMwatch sent out a national warning.

“These hoax death threats typically involve SMS text arriving out of the blue from what appears to be an international number. In some cases the number appears to be blocked,” SCAMwatch said.

“A typical message reads: ‘Someone paid me to kill you. If you want me to spare you, I’ll give you two days to pay $5000. If you inform the police or anybody, you will die, I am monitoring you’.

“Some of the messages are long and contain all the text, while others are broken up into shorter messages.”

The Daily understands the scam started spreading over the weekend and was sent out again yesterday morning.

Reports indicate the requested amount varied from $1000 to $50,000.

Police urged members of the public not to be alarmed and not to respond in any way to the message.

The police should urge the public to forward to the messages to an official abuse desk for free.

Phone providers can assign a SMS abuse reporting number (e.g. 8888) so it funtions like reporting email abuse (e.g. abuse@providername.com). The SCAMwatch form for reporting abuse is so big I doubt most people could fill it out in less than five minutes, which means it won’t be used.

Providers also could be a lot smarter about their blocking services. If the official response was to forward fraud messages for free to the providers then far more pressure would be felt by providers to stop fraud and SMS abuse.

Bike-cams Help Catch Hit-and-Run Drivers

As many of you know I’ve ridden cycles most of my life including racing, commuting every day in large cities and long tours. It wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco that I personally experienced a hit-and-run accident.

A van exceeding the speed-limit crossed the white line, side-swiped me and knocked me over. It amazed me that despite many people standing nearby watching traffic no one could describe anything other than a white van. I was hit at the corner of Pacific and Hyde where people were waiting at the bus stop, sitting outside at the cafe, standing on the corner waiting to cross…plenty of witnesses but no help. In fact, they just stood and watched while I picked myself up, checked my bleeding injuries and moved my bike off the street.

StreetView on Google, strangely enough, shows a white van speeding away from the scene where I was hit.


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The NYT writes that this risk equation is changing with use of cameras on bicycles.

“It’s a fact of life that on American roads that you get punked, cut off purposely, harassed, not once but on a regular basis,” said Bob Mionske, a former Olympic cyclist who is now a lawyer representing bicyclists in Portland, Ore. “If motorists start to hear about bikes having cameras, they’re going to think twice about running you off the road.”

A video by Berkeley cyclists, mentioned in the NYT article, provides a good example of how this can work. At 2:35 a black Acura Integra suddenly side-swipes two cyclists and then speeds away, exactly as it happened to me.

The video, which shows the Integra’s license plate, led police to the owner. The owner then apparently claimed it was stolen at the time of accident.

Of course the police should ask the car owner “do you have video to prove that it was stolen?”

A recent decision on “undisclosed recording” (Maryland v. Graber) suggests “video taping of public events is protected under the First Amendment.”

Here is a year of video by a cyclist, as presented by CNN: