There’s no going back to the old days.
Even though it is already January of the new year.
This is an ordinary old multi-storey residential building in Shanghai, with no elevator. Two people carry a bundle of sugar cane upstairs and have to turn sideways. The house is in a small corner on the third floor, and unlike other rooms in the building, it has an extra screen door, which is sealed in the middle so that only the bottom can let in light.
After knocking twice, a man in his 50s or 60s asked warily at the other end of the screen door, who is it?
A month and a half ago, in mid-November, the building was made a priority surveillance target and the man’s son was diagnosed positive for Neocon. Next, events far exceeded their control, and it was no longer something that could be capped off with a single flow transfer or isolation.
The house area, ID numbers, travel tracks …… a large Family of information was all published on the Internet. The man’s son, and the girl’s dinner information, became a social platform after dinner segment, the topic from the Epidemic prevention and control to Marriage cleavage interspersed with flirtation, abuse.
The man’s phone was busted, he manually blacked out strange numbers one by one, and there was a constant stream of new strange numbers calling in. In the daytime, he keeps the windows closed tightly. But there was always insecurity, feeling groundless, as if he was a sinner.
The authorities gave him an apology, saying that the information might have been leaked out by a hacker. He felt puzzled and turned to anger, “We just cooperate with the flow of tunes, and we are not any celebrities, so why would it be leaked out, and why should we suffer so much condemnation and malice? “
He is not the first, nor is he the last.
Who is the aggressor?
Ms. Zhou tried to recall the places she had been in 14 days, and the clearer her recollection, the better it would be for the control of the epidemic. She was one of 77 new confirmed cases of new crown pneumonia in Shijiazhuang on Jan. 10.
On January 11, news about the more than 30 places she had visited in 7 days was all over the place. Customers who had her WeChat circle of friends also posted screenshots of her circle of friends to social networks. “A female wandering around what”, “hardworking Drug disperser” …… breathtaking netizen messages began to analyze speculations involving her private Life such as whether she was divorced or married.
She only explained and did not apologize – even when someone pulled her into a WeChat group and forced her to apologize.
And a month ago, Zhao, a Chengdu girl with a similar experience to hers, chose to apologize publicly.
Earlier, she, who was the first to cooperate with the epidemic prevention department to do the flow transfer after the diagnosis, had her personal information forwarded on multiple social media platforms in less than a day, including her name, ID number, Home address and photo, because of the rapid fermentation of the information in the flow transfer, bouncing around multiple bars in one night.
“A twenty-year-old girl, no fixed occupation, in addition to going to the nail salon is a variety of bars? “, “decent girls who go to that kind of place? “Her phone was blown up, with up to six calls coming in at the same Time a minute, and even the prevention and control staff’s calls were not coming in.
At the height of the fermenting public opinion, she spoke out through social media, explaining that her job was the marketing of the bar’s atmosphere, as well as publicly apologizing to the people of Chengdu and the nation, “for causing trouble and breaking everyone’s otherwise peaceful lives. “
What she “did wrong” was to live her life normally without knowing that her loved ones were infected.
A longtime scholar of privacy was chilled on the day Zhao apologized. His own circle of friends was swept up by the trajectory of the “Chengdu girl,” and many of those who forwarded the message were well-educated, middle-class people. In their view, their own safety is more important than others’ privacy leaks, and the more detailed and specific the announcement of the flow, the better. “
The police locked up a 24-year-old man, Wang Mou, who forwarded a picture of the Chengdu epidemic and Zhao Moumou’s identity information and activity track on his Weibo account, and punished him administratively.
But in the opinion of the above-mentioned scholars, privacy leakage is not simply an individual act, but a collective evil of a group.
At the beginning of last year, after the personal information of many Wuhan returnees was leaked after cooperating with the investigation, many Wuhan returnees reported being threatened by strangers via phone and WeChat, and some even pulled banners to warn them at their homes.
Who are the leakers?
The form of the leak is déjà vu.
It’s all about the flow of transfer documents that appear in WeChat groups.
A year ago, it was so.
In January 2020, Hunan Yiyang City, a number of community owners WeChat group suddenly appeared a “report on the investigation of a case of new coronavirus infection pneumonia reported by the Fourth People’s Hospital in Yiyang City”, the content of the patient and the privacy of 11 people, such as the close contact group.
The deputy director of the health and Health Bureau of Heshan District, Yiyang City, forwarded the report via WeChat to the staff of the Financial Assessment Unit of the Heshan District Finance Bureau. This unintentional action was forwarded to the head of the Supervision Unit of the Heshan District Finance Bureau after only 15 minutes. The head of the unit forwarded the report to a group of 47 relatives.
As word spread, the private information involving the patients went from a confidential document held by the very few people involved in the flow of the investigation to an open secret.
Shen Hilly, director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Peking University and professor at the Law School, told Eight Points Health News that because China adopts a social mobilization model of prevention and control, government departments, disease control agencies, communities, units, public places and other types of organizations have become de jure or de facto subjects of information collection on confirmed cases, and the possibility of privacy leaks exists in all the links.
Wang Hua, a county-level CDC flow transfer officer in Sichuan Province, also feels quite helpless. The flow investigation work is usually done by members of the district and county CDC, so Wang Hua has always regarded himself as a “formal investigator”, but often encountered confirmed cases or confidential staff complained, “How many times have you investigated? “.
He was shocked, then thought: Maybe hospitals and towns have sent people to investigate, but they ask the same questions, but do not share information.
This exposed the confusion of management in epidemic prevention and control.
From the analysis of Wang Hua’s workflow, the report is sent in the qq group, through the hands of field flow transfer personnel, statisticians, reporting personnel, and then by the higher-level disease control units, reported to the health administration. A report will go through many people – even though they do not have direct contact with the case.
According to the Jiangxi Zixi County Discipline Inspection Commission, in January 2020, Cao Mou, the deputy town manager in charge of health work in Jiangxi’s Hesheng Township, sent the personal information of confirmed cases of new crown pneumonia, combed and made into a spreadsheet, to Zhou Mou, the head of the Lusheng villagers’ military company in Hesheng Township. Zhou forwarded the table to someone’s WeChat group without permission. Soon, the information was rapidly disseminated.
The staff of the Xichang Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who similarly violated the law by leaking personal information about people involved in The prevention of the new crown pneumonia, was filed for investigation.
Doctors were another source of leaks.
On January 6, while Hangzhou notified a case of an asymptomatic infected person imported from abroad with Fuyang, the identity information, contact number and other personal information of the asymptomatic infected person were widely disseminated on the Internet and were rumored.
The public security authorities found that Lin, a physician of a hospital’s hospitalization department located in West Lake District, forwarded the relevant flow investigation report to a WeChat group, resulting in a large spread on the Internet. Lin was sentenced to five days of administrative detention.
Similar situations have been repeatedly prohibited in the past year.
On February 1, 2020, the staff of a community health service center in Dongsheng District, Ordos sent the list of people involved in the epidemic investigation to an internal work group, which was forwarded to three social mass WeChat groups by non-staff members of the group without permission, triggering a large number of forwarding by netizens.
Wenshan, Yunnan, 5 medical staff of Wenshan Prefecture People’s Hospital disseminated information on the prevention and control of the epidemic among patients. They were finally administratively detained for 10 days and fined 500 yuan.
Pinghu, Zhejiang, Xu, a practicing physician in the Department of Anesthesiology of the First People’s Hospital of Pinghu City, sent the medical records of patients with confirmed new crowns to his classmates’ WeChat group.
Guangxi Fuchuan Yao Autonomous County, the People’s Hospital Laboratory Department inspector Song Mou, the same use of the Laboratory Department computer query to the hospital admitted to the new pneumonia suspected cases of patients hospital medical records, shooting pictures sent to the family WeChat group.
In addition to doctors, disease control personnel, any link in the flow of transfer, there is a risk of privacy leaks.
In Yanjiao, Hebei, a street office worker was detained for 10 days and fined 500 yuan for leaking the privacy of the epidemic.
On January 4, 2021, Pan Xuhong, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, publicly informed at a press conference that on December 23, 2020, an employee of an aviation security limited company took a private photo of the preliminary flow transfer report of patients used to screen the close receiver during work and sent it to the WeChat group, resulting in the leakage of patients’ privacy.
What to investigate and what to release to the public?
A flow investigation report is seven or eight pages long, first briefly filling out a case investigation form (containing personal information, basic medical conditions, sources of infection, etc.), and then detailed questioning by staff about personal trajectories and exposure cases.
Epidemiological investigation of the subject’s complaints is only part of the investigation, but also combined with big data, public security and other information to confirm the trajectory of the actions of the subject.
The balance between epidemic prevention and control and personal privacy has been a difficult problem faced by the whole world, and the new crown epidemic has brought this problem, into focus.
Shen believes that citizens and the public should be informed only to the extent necessary for the effective prevention and control of the epidemic and to the extent necessary for the minimal infringement of privacy.
How to define the “minimum”? What information can be disclosed to the public?
Will there be a next one?
On December 25, 2020, the day Zhao was released from the hospital in Chengdu, she posted a long essay on social media. She wrote, “I am actually very optimistic in life, I like to dance, I did not do atmosphere marketing before, I worked as a dance teacher. I will continue to be optimistic and live well. “
There were messages of blessing, but there were also more people complaining that she was affecting their own lives, with messages like “Keep going to the bar and having fun” and “You got me isolated and let my vacation go down the drain” hanging sarcastically on her deleted ShakeYin account with only two videos left.
“(The group’s voyeurism) has no restraint, no boundaries, and there will still be the next ‘Chengdu girl’. “The appearance of Shijiazhuang Ms. Zhou made the above-mentioned scholars’ fears a reality a month later.
What is surprising is that in the past year, there has been a constant stream of people being punished by law for leaking personal information, but personal privacy leaks have been repeated.
The constant emergence of people infected with the New Coronavirus who have had their privacy leaked and have been subjected to net violence makes it seem that there is a lack of a clear line delineating the scope of privacy and epidemic prevention and control and self-protection, from specific staff in the public sector, such as government departments and disease control agencies, to the scope of personal awareness of the eating public.
Under the anxiety and panic about the new crown epidemic, some people attribute the impact of the epidemic on their own lives to those infected with the new crown, especially those whose trajectories involve multiple aggregated sites and “super-spreaders” who cause multiple infections “. Whether it was the “Jinjiang drug king” who was flirted with in February last year or the net violence in December “Chengdu girl” in December, people blamed them for “causing the whole neighborhood and the whole city to be closed “.
If the public lacks this consensus: those infected people who do not know they have been infected with the new crown virus, they are first and foremost human beings, victims of the virus, not objects that move and actively spread it.
Then there will always be the next one.
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