A latest report released in Beijing shows in the past year, economic loss caused by the violation of netizens' rights totaled 91.5 billion yuan and around 9% of Internet users suffered more than 1,000 yuan or more in losses.
SMS spam, fraud information and leakage of personal information were the top three reasons resulting in the netizens' losses, said the report on the protection of rights of Internet users which was issued by the Internet Society of China during the China Internet Conference held between June 21 and June 23 in Beijing
In the past six months, Chinese netizens received about 19 spam emails and 21 spam messages every week. Harassing phone calls tops the most offensive source of harassment followed by pop-up ads on the computer as well as in APPs, according to the report.
The report notes that 76% of Chinese Internet users have visited phishing websites, 66% have received fraud phone calls, 51% have received spam mails and 47% have encountered cheating on social networking sites. Furthermore 37% of them has suffered economic loss stemming from the above-mentioned frauds.
In the regard of rights violations, the report says "inducing users to click on" is the main means, which is followed by "pre-installed software that cannot be uninstalled" and also via "APP access to personal information that the users do not know is going on".
