The Public Security Department reported that 1,700 people were arrested on suspicion of theft or improper use of the Chinese people's personal information. Investigations and arrests took place almost across the whole territory of China — in 20 provinces, including Beijing and Shanghai.
Over the course of the investigation, officials found out that the workers of financial institutions, telecommunications companies and other institutions which have personal information databases were selling the personal information to fraudsters.
Zhou Shuangcheng, an IT company worker, was arrested in August 2011 for selling the personal information of millions cellphone users. Zhou had access to the database of a telecommunications company to which they provided IT services. The insider sold 10 million pieces of information from this database for 5,000 yuan (800 US dollars). The personal information buyer confessed to reselling this information to an advertising agency.
Lawyers believe that the enactment of a bill on citizens' personal information protection will significantly decrease the number of leaks and will clarify which information should be considered personal. This year the officials are going to make the first steps towards solving the problem of the Chinese people's personal information protection. The Software Testing Centre and the Department of Industry and IT Technologies in cooperation with 30 institutions proposed obliging service providers to request permission from citizens to use their personal information.
As the InfoWatch analysts found out, the prompt actions on detention of fraudsters with citizens' personal information had taken place in China before. Thus the law-enforcement authorities closed down 611 companies and destroyed 161 databases of illegally collected information.
Nikolay Fedotov, head InfoWatch Analyst commented: «In our global statistics of leaks, China ranked in one of the last places in the absolute number of incidents. And by incident number relative to the number of population, it ranks second from last with a large gap.
Currently, we can see that Celestial Empire authorities have started not only to solve the problem of personal information protection, but also do not conceal the ascertained facts of personal information abuse.
History teaches us: when the Chinese start doing something this "something" must be multiplied by a billion. The industry of cybercrime abusing personal information (half of which is international) is expected to suffer significantly in the months ahead».
