"It was the best of times and the worst of times!" Dickens' words 60 years ago are now more and more recognized. In the Internet era, when people enjoy the convenience of big data mind reading, they have to bear the hidden danger of information leakage and data abuse.
Facebook user data was leaked before, and founder Zuckerberg was "interrogated" by the US Congress for two consecutive days. According to media reports, the user information of many food delivery platforms has been leaked. Online sellers and food delivery riders sell food delivery customer information including name, address, ordering platform, order times, etc. The price of each piece of information is less than ten cents.
status quo
According to the Beijing News investigation, customer information of food delivery platforms such as Ele.me, Baidu Takeaway, and Meituan are all sold in some QQ groups, and the channels for user information acquisition mainly come from two aspects: first, some takeaway riders, The second is some network companies that act as agents to operate takeaway stores.
According to someone who sells user information in the QQ group, the data from "system insiders" is updated once a day at noon and sold out at night. These data are in recent months, including the user's name, contact information and address and other information, but there is no order date, and the average amount of information varies from one dime.
The Beijing News reporter randomly verified 100 phone numbers from the 5,000 lists obtained, of which 61 were valid numbers. As for the question of "why there are invalid numbers", the salesperson said that "some data may have been replaced". Compared with the data extracted by "system insiders", the agency operation takeaway store is crawled with a certain software, and the data is more real-time, secret and accurate. These data are for the past two days, including the user's name, gender, phone number, address, order times and other information, but the price is more expensive, 5 cents per item. According to the sales staff, these data are generally bought for store operations, and the conversion rate is very high.
In response to the information leak of the food delivery platform reported by the media, Meituan Food Delivery responded that it has started the verification and investigation of relevant information, and has reported the case to the police. Meituan Waimai said that due to the long delivery chain of food delivery, involving multiple links such as platforms, merchants, and third-party delivery, there may be criminals to obtain information. For such incidents, it will be severely punished, and at the same time, together with the public security organs, we will make every effort to crack down on illegal acts of stealing and reselling user information.
Ele.me responded that due to the complex information security environment of the whole society at present, malicious data security incidents have occurred from time to time, causing consumers to suffer losses. For Ele.me and the entire food delivery industry, everyone is also a victim. . After seeing the relevant reports, we have started all-out investigation and have been actively cooperating with relevant departments. Ele.me also said that it will work with industry friends to deal with it, and will definitely find out those black sheep in time.
The public has pushed privacy protection to the forefront. Under the theme of the era of data being king, how to truly protect privacy is the most important issue today and even in the future.
Blockchain technology provides new ideas
How to fundamentally solve the data monopoly and truly protect user privacy has become a problem that people from all walks of life are pondering hard. It is untenable to ensure the security of user data through the improvement of code, because as long as there are always loopholes in the code, there is a risk of being leaked and hacked, which cannot be eradicated.
The blockchain technology with decentralization, immutability, and point-to-point transmission has brought new ideas to this. Due to the distributed storage characteristics of blockchain, there is almost no possibility of data leakage and attack. Unless more than 50% of the computing power of the entire network is mastered, this difficulty is no different from finding a needle in a haystack. However, the blockchain has drawn a perfect blueprint for us, but it faces many practical challenges when it is actually implemented.
Privacy Form
Similar to takeout, the logistics industry has also experienced user information leakage problems. Since the express order involves a variety of private information such as the user's name, mobile phone, address, etc., the personal information involves multiple links such as shippers, intermediate channels, courier companies, self-collection outlets, and couriers in the entire circulation process, and there is a problem in a certain link. will result in the leakage of personal information.
When user information is collected in large quantities, classified and sold downstream, targeted marketing, precise fraud, and seamless impersonation will appear frequently. In order to avoid the use of hand-ripped noodle sheets by people with intentions, since last year, many express delivery companies such as JD.com, Cainiao, and YTO have started to use "privacy face sheets", that is, using technical means to anonymize express face sheets. On the privacy sheet, the four digits in the middle of the consumer's name and phone number will be withheld.
Although several major domestic express delivery companies have launched invisible face orders, most of them are in the regional pilot stage, which is far from being fully popularized. Since the privacy sheet relies on electronic face sheets and cloud printing technology, it is difficult for e-commerce buyers to install cloud printing equipment, so it is difficult to popularize the privacy sheet; for express companies, privacy There are also certain challenges. The related supporting equipment and development costs are very high, and not all companies are willing or able to bear it. Whether it can cover all users in the future is still a problem.
Some people pointed out that the privacy sheet does not keep the information in a state of absolute security, but only increases the cost and threshold for obtaining information. In the cloud or server where the real data is stored, there is still a risk of leakage.
The head of a well-known domestic Internet company recently expressed his opinions on privacy issues, which has attracted attention from all parties and caused some debates. As far as the actual experience of the Internet is concerned, do users really want to trade privacy for convenience?