A city where identity cards were thrown to the wind - a time when the Chinese Internet was flooded with personal information (late 2000s-early 2010s)

A city where identity cards were thrown to the wind - a time when the Chinese Internet was flooded with personal information (late 2000s-early 2010s)

From the late 2000s to the early 2010s, the concept of personal information itself had not yet taken root in China's online space. As the nation's growth and the shift to IT progressed simultaneously, convenience and speed were prioritized, and the protection of personal information was relegated to the background. Symbolic of this trend was the reality that a large number of real photos of ID cards were published on the Internet.

At the time, it was not uncommon for donors' ID photos to be posted on fundraising websites and bulletin boards in China under the guise of demonstrating the transparency of the donation culture. In order to prove their good intentions, the pictures were lined up so that the donors' names, addresses, and ID numbers could be clearly read. There was no malice in this, but rather it was taken as an expression of respect and trust, which is a clear indication of the atmosphere unique to this era.

However, the ID photos published on the Internet turned out to be a treasure trove of OSINT. Information that can uniquely identify an individual is ideal material for a malicious third party if placed unprotected as an image. The potential uses were extremely wide-ranging, including fraud, identity theft, black market resale, and diversion to financial crimes. The problem is that society as a whole was largely unaware of these dangers.

This is due to the values of the group rather than the individual and pragmatism rather than rights in Chinese society. Identity cards are controlled by the state, and there was little awareness that private information should be protected by individuals. In addition, amid rapid economic growth, the system and education did not keep pace, and IT literacy was biased toward the technology used, and risk management and imagination of misuse were not nurtured.

The author points out that this problem is not unique to China. Even the Japanese government had little sense of urgency about the strategic value of personal information at the time and did not fully understand the importance of information gathering and analysis. As competition among nations shifted to cyberspace, Japan lagged behind the rest of the world in recognizing how powerful the accumulation of publicly available information could be.

The spectacle of identities being exposed unprotected is not just a moral failure. It was a distortion of the times, the result of a rapidly growing society that put off the development of institutions and awareness. Before personal information was understood to have value, it was exposed to the wind and scattered about the city. The record of this is quietly left as a harbinger of the cybercrime and surveillance society that will come later.