The discovery by Chinese netizens that domestic smart TVs automatically scan and collect information about their home network has sparked widespread concern. Soon, the Shenzhen Skyworth company involved and Beijing Hook Data both issued statements in response. But the country does not believe they will give up this business.
V2EX forum last week, a netizen posted an article “my TV is monitoring all connected devices”, exposing that the Android system of his own Skyworth TV was connected to the “hookup data service”, scanning connected devices once every ten minutes, even including the information of his neighbors.
The “hook up data service” is from Beijing hook up data technology Co. The company is the first big data company in the field of smart big screen in mainland China, covering 103 million smart TV terminals by the end of 2018, accounting for 55% of the total number of devices on the network. As of April 2019, the company has entered into long-term partnerships with Skyworth, Kukai, TCL, Changhong, Konka, Fengxing, Weizi, TVMall, Sanyo, Toshiba, Philips and other companies, by implanting SDKs in the system layer in order to obtain smart TV data collection.
A number of domestic media soon reported the matter and made public two statements from Shenzhen Skyworth and Beijing Hook Data Company.
In the statement, Skyworth said that it had completely disabled the “hookup service” on all Skyworth TVs, and that Skyworth’s Kukai Technology had sent a letter to cancel the cooperation with Beijing Hookup Data Technology Co.
The company explained in a statement that the program can be disabled by itself and that the collected user data is used for ratings research-related business, including household and individual ratings, ratings effect analysis, advertising ratings analysis and optimization. The statement claims that the company’s user privacy policy is not clear enough, causing some users to worry about privacy security, and therefore “sincerely apologize” to users.
In this regard, Shanxi legal scholar Mr. Song told Radio Free Asia on May 5 that he believes it is unlikely that the company will stop collecting user data, otherwise it will lose its survival value.
“Are there a lot of companies in the country like the hookup service? It’s definitely not just this one company that does this kind of thing. And the partner companies that receive hookup services, like Skyworth, aren’t there Haier, aren’t there Konka, aren’t there other brands of TV sets, so there’s no privacy protection in China.”
Xing Jian, a former citizen journalist for SixFourTen.com, also said that China’s network surveillance is everywhere, and this time it was just caught by netizens, and he doesn’t believe that hookup data companies are therefore giving up that business:.
“Shenzhen’s Skyworth TV, although issued a statement, also admitted that the use of ‘hookup service’ to collect user information is a mistake will be corrected, a number of other companies and the company signed a cooperation agreement to use the ‘hookup service’ so far have not The company has not issued any response. The illegal operation violated the user’s privacy without any punishment, and it was supported to some extent by the Chinese government.”
Xing Jian had earlier revealed that the CCP had developed the open source Android system and used it in domestic TV sets, ostensibly to provide TV viewers with richer programming, but in fact the actual purpose was “to achieve network-wide surveillance, further strengthen the rulers’ efforts to maintain stability, and create a social situation in which everyone is at risk.
He cited the example of the Android system, which was used by the Communist Party to monitor farmers’ homes in the rural areas for the “Xueliang Project”.
“The Android system was used in the Xueliang project to achieve ‘full area coverage, full network sharing, full time availability, full control’ of public security video surveillance construction networking applications for rural areas and alleys. The application is usually in the form of “spyware” into the user’s cell phone, TV and other Android devices, automatically scan, collect the user’s device model, use information, social and so on uploaded to the official database to achieve network-wide monitoring.”
Zhang Hai, a resident of Shenzhen, pointed out that in addition to domestic smart TV sets, the authorities’ data collection on cell phone users is even more serious.
“I saw a long time ago that domestic cell phones collect information on every person. In China, this kind of collection of personal information is normalized, and it shows that our personal privacy is not protected.”
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