It was belatedly revealed that more than 1.1 billion cases of user information were leaked from Taobao, China’s largest shopping app. Taobao, which operating under Alibaba, has had its users data leaked since 2019. The culprit are as revealed, Lu and Lee.
According to the Global Times on the 17th, Lu, who is in Henan Province, extracted 1.18 billion Taobao’s user IDs and mobile phone numbers through web scraping using self-developed software for eight months from 2019.
Using this information, Lee made 1,100 WeChat chat rooms, posted advertising links, and took 340,000 yuan (about 60 million won) as a commission for users to purchase products.
According to a recent ruling released by a court in Sanggu, Henan Province, Lu and Lee were sentenced to three years in prison side by side. They were also fined.
Earlier, Taobao reported to the police that there was a leak of customer information in August last year.
Taobao said in a statement the previous day that no leaked customer data was sold to third parties and no economic losses were incurred.
“Taobao is putting a lot of resources into fighting unauthorized scraping of our platform. “Data privacy and safety are the most important,” he said. “We preemptively discovered and solved this scraping case.”
China plans to implement a “data security law” starting in September that will strengthen government control over data.
Some criticize that China is controlling domestic and foreign Internet companies with data security at the forefront.