TL;DR - You will have to verify your ID to go online. The government will have easier access to monitor all your online activities and can basically ban you from the internet entirely. The claimed purpose is to safe guard against privacy leaks, which is obviously bullshit.
If this is implemented, it could have one rather big advantage: if all ID checking were done through one government app, this could give foreigners access to all the apps and services we can’t use without Chinese ID.
Kind of like what alipay already does, I can sometimes use apps and services in alipay that don’t work in wechat.
Of course I fully expect this will be rolled out without support for foreign IDs for the first couple of months. We’ll see.
By law, any internet service needing the logging, collection, and verification of user data, the user can use 网号，网证 to verify instead (without giving companies any of your actual data).
In essence, what its saying is that for apps that need you to verify yourself (Alipay, Wechat Pay, Games, Taobao, Xianyu, etc) you don’t need to submit your ID details, just your 网证 to say “Hey, I’ve verified my identity with the government I don’t need to verify with you sketchy companies”.
BBC and 小红书 and (unofficial) WeChat articles aren’t very sources of information to find about Chinese policies, its better to find them on government websites and state media
Seems to be something similar to identifying people by their IP addresses which can and has been used to identify the owner of the internet device before.
Like the IP address, the VPN should hide all of that once you go through all the scrambling, leaving whatever credentials you have on each of the platforms that you are accessing. I am also at loss at how this would work on public hotspots (i.e. starbucks) or private hotspots (i.e. office, friend’s house).
It doesnt seem to be anything groundbreaking (again, at a quick glance and the scope of what the X article provides), but yet another and rather redundant at a glance way to bing real ids to random internet things. I dont see this functioning any differently from the phone number id you need to connect to public hotspots or IP address to identify the user in a home/company setting. In other words, a random bigshot wasting money posing as they are doing something~
Take photo and video is for facial recognition and QR code scanner, for the audio record I have no idea, read and write about photo can be to import and download document, access to biometric is for security and log in, have internet access is because you need internet to make a security check otherwise if is client sided it can be easily manipulated
It is “voluntary”, but based on the Chinese government’s previous bad record, this “voluntary” is likely to be temporary. Whether it will be forced to be fully implemented in the end depends on public opinion. Yes, the Chinese government ignores public opinion, but the public opinion against this policy is quite strong, and they have to consider it.
The reason for the introduction of this policy is that the Chinese government is in financial difficulties and the stability maintenance budget is unable to support very extensive and in-depth monitoring. Therefore, through this unified ID identification method, people’s network whereabouts can be more accurately controlled and a consistent and immediate response can be made, reducing the cost of using stability maintenance personnel.
Don’t listen to anyone who says that this policy is to prevent information leakage. The online privacy of Chinese people is already riddled with holes, and the largest and most serious cases of privacy leakage often come from government departments and state-owned enterprises, such as the Shanghai Public Security Bureau and China Mobile, where privacy leakage is in billions. The leakage of private enterprises is not good either, but it is much better.
I wholeheartedly support our government’s newest intranet policy to protect every chinese privacy and prevent online scandals by the chinese. And I pity those laowai who cannot enjoy the same level of security and face the bullshittery of the real internet. I really hope that someday such a good online protection method will benefit everyone in the world, just like a condom you can never peel off.
It’s like when I work in American every once a while there will be Americans talking about how evil the social credit score is and how every Chinese is controlled by it, this is the new ”social credit” BS
Not gonna happen not only theoretically but also practically since they would have to create a whole new system from the ground up that is separate to local Chinese for just 0.0001% of the population.
Read somewhere that the difference is with this method, the governing body can grab the person’s ID and ban all accounts across all apps in one go, whereas before they had to go through each app. So its the efficiency.