In early February, the Chinese government launched an application to let its citizens know if they had come into contact with people infected with Covid-19. Now the Alipay Health Code app assigns a rating to its users, reports the New York Times.
When a Chinese user installs the application, the program retrieves a large amount of data about it. The process is quite simple since in China, the majority of personal data is centralized, notably in the ecosystem of Alibaba (Aliexpress), of which Alipay Health Code is a part.
Depending on the data collected, the application assigns a color to its user: green, yellow or red. Green signifies that the citizen is healthy and can move about freely, yellow corresponds to a potential house arrest for seven days and red signifies the quarantine of the user.
The Chinese surveillance system in action
The application is based on several criteria to give a color to a user; if he has been in contact with an infected person - information collected thanks to the surveillance system pushed into the Chinese streets -, if he has visited a risk zone or if he has declared certain suspicious symptoms. But the functioning of the app remains quite obscure. According to the New York Times , some users have received a red code without being sick.
Users must present the verdict of the application (a color QR code) when passing through the various checkpoints installed in Chinese cities. If the QR code is not correct, citizens will not be able to pass the check point.
The Alipay Health Code app has been downloaded more than 50 million times by February 24 in Zhejiang Province, reports Konbini. Its capital, Hangzhou, was the first city to be quarantined. The app has been adopted in more than 200 Chinese cities.
During its investigation, the NYT noted that the information thus collected was automatically transmitted to the police. The latter can thus know in real time the location of citizens through checkpoints.
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- coronavirus
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