Surfing the Internet can be dangerous if someone is determined to get your personal data. Photo: IC

Today is Data Privacy Day (in Europe it is known as Data Protection Day), an international day set for January 28 and intended to increase awareness of privacy and data protection issues for consumers, organizations, and government officials.

Data in the "information age" is increasingly difficult to protect. When someone buys a home nowadays within a very short time interior decorating firms are contacting the new buyer.

Car insurance firms seem to know exactly when someone buys a new car. Purchase an airline ticket online and a deluge of offers from hotels and travel agencies floods in.

Illegally trading personal data has become big business and it is growing in China.

Hackers and even staff in major companies or government departments can access personal information and sell it. Just 1,000 yuan can buy a lot of names, addresses and pay details.

Sometimes nothing happens but often ordinary people lose out, either to fraudsters using information to access funds or by being harassed by phone calls from strangers trying to sell them products they have no interest in.

Unwanted calls 

A Shanghai Consumer Council survey in 2014 showed that 99 percent of the 1,465 consumers interviewed had been harassed by sales calls or sales messages. Most of the calls or text messages were from insurance companies, followed by financial institutions and real estate agents.

A similar survey of 78,846 people by xinhuanet.com showed that 99.6 percent had received junk messages and sales calls, and 92.4 percent reported receiving more than three of these messages a day.

It doesn't seem to matter either if the recipient doesn't understand what is being sold. New Zealand-born journalist and Shanghai resident Paul LePetit told the Global Times that he is constantly harassed by unwanted sales calls.

"Often they begin with a recorded message, so you are not even talking to someone real," LePetit said, "I usually say 'hello' to make sure that the caller realizes I don't speak Chinese. But they persist as though they don't understand I really don't want to talk to them."

He said he could receive as many as five calls a day this way. "Nowadays if I hear it is a recorded message I hang up immediately. And if it is a real person who doesn't understand that I don't want to buy anything, I hang up in frustration."

Milena Dimitrova from Bulgaria has the same problem and this started when she first arrived in China four years ago.

"Many times I receive random calls, around twice a week. Usually I pick up, and they start talking in Chinese. Sometimes a person is speaking but sometimes it is just an automatic recording machine."

Fast talkers

"If it is a person on the phone, I listen to them as they start naming their companies, products and services to me," said Dimitrova. "When I tell them directly I don't want to buy anything from them, they start talking very quickly in Chinese. As a foreigner I have no idea what they are saying."

It's an annoyance but Dimitrova has not found a way of handling these callers yet. "One way to avoid this would be to not answer the phone but it could be someone who really needs to talk to me. I hang up as soon I realize it is a sales call."

What really concerns her is how the callers have obtained her number and personal information. And she also feels harassed by the text messages which appear on her phone regularly. "Usually these messages have someone's name and a bank account number, and ask me to transfer money to the bank account," Dimitrova said. She gets one of these messages just about every morning.

A friend of hers lost money when he clicked onto a link in a message that seemed to come from his bank. Within seconds 3,000 yuan ($456) had vanished from his account. "That was all the money he had at the time and he needed that to pay his rent," Dimitrova said.

She said that the hackers in China were very professional and warned expats to be careful about clicking on links in text messages.

Internet troubles

Personal information safety is a big concern for the growing population of Chinese netizens. According to a survey by the Internet Society of China in 2015, around 78.2 percent of Internet users who responded had had personal details leaked, including names, education backgrounds, home addresses, ID numbers and workplaces.

And 63.4 percent of the respondents believed details of their online activities including shopping records, Web surfing history and IP addresses, had been given to third-party companies. The Internet Society of China estimated that over the year 2015 Internet information leaks and frauds had cost netizens 80.5 billion yuan.

Journalist Liu Tian is one of the victims. She told the Global Times that she no longer trusts Alipay or any of the online payment platforms. A few months ago someone hacked her Alipay account and removed 1,000 yuan.

"I was woken at 3 in the morning by 10 text messages saying there had been small transactions on the account and about 1,000 yuan had been transferred from the bank account linked to my Alipay account," Liu said. Within minutes she had a text message from the bank saying the Alipay account had withdrawn the money.

Liu immediately called the bank's 24-hour hotline and froze her account cancelling all of her bank cards that had been linked to Alipay. By the next morning police and Alipay customer services took up the case and although Alipay refunded her losses, the police could not track the fraudster.

"The transaction records on my Alipay account showed that my money went to an online games company," Liu said. "Since I used the same registered email address, phone number and user name but different passwords on different websites, it could have been easy for criminals to find the username and password for my Alipay account."

Li Jianhua is the Dean of the College of Information Security at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and explained why personal information is so accessible these days.

"The moment we are born, all of our personal information is stored and can be traced through things like our marital status, house purchase records, bank card information," Li said, "However the online community currently lacks effective management and supervision to protect personal information. Also there are no definitive laws regulating the use of personal data. More importantly, many companies are not responsible and honest enough, and tend to misuse their users' information for their own benefit."

To prevent personal data being leaked in the meantime, he suggested people should be more aware of data privacy and practice safer Internet habits.

Wifi warnings

"For example, netizens could use security protection software while surfing online. It's also safer for them to use their mobile phone data rather than free public Wifi links because Wifi in public places can reveal online records and bankcard information to third parties," Li said.

He said corporations and governments should play a more important role in protecting personal data. He would like to see authorities regulating the use of personal data with tough laws that would give individuals the right to know how their data is used. Tougher regulations would push network operators and companies to increase their social responsibility and to proactively protect users' information.
Newspaper headline: Keeping secrets