The defendants on trial in a local court on Tuesday. (Photo/Beijing News Photo)
A legal representative and five employees of a Chinese company, Kuailu Online Beijing Information and Technology Co. Ltd., on Tuesday were sentenced over infringement of personal information after leaking 619,109 units of data.
According to the prosecutors, the defendants had exchanged the information with other salesmen through QQ, an instant messaging platform, from March 2014 to July 2017.
The suspects aimed to promote the attorney consultation service the company provided by calling the people on the information list.
The six had admitted their criminal behavior and have been sentenced to two to four years in prison. Some of them had received monetary punishment.
During the trial, the defendants said they also got access to personal data through Qichacha, an app that provides the contact information of legal representatives.
"I receive calls from strangers every day," said Mr. Liang, a legal representative of a cellphone company based in Shenzhen. Liang claimed he had never registered any information on platforms such as Qichacha.
The primitive way of marketing not only affects the legal field, but Chinese in other industries as well.
"We usually made 100 calls with potential customers, but only two or three of them agreed to check our catalog by email," Mr. Zhao, who used to promote financial products for a Beijing company, told CGTN Digital.
"People were asking where I got their personal information," Zhao said.
The misuse of information should be charged according to Chinese law, lawyer Bao Hua from Anli Partners told the Beijing News.
The Ninth Amendment of the Criminal Law of China was implemented on November 1, 2015. The name of the crime has been changed to the Crime of Infringement on Personal Information of Citizens from the Crime of Illegal Access to Personal Information of Citizens.
The awareness of personal data security has risen in China over the past few years, as people worldwide are calling for information protection after the Facebook data scandal.
