Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system

China is launching a digital ID system, giving Beijing greater control over online activity and further raising concerns about surveillance and censorship.

China has long mastered what was once considered impossible: Completely controlling the internet within its borders. On Tuesday, Beijing will take another step toward centralizing its power over the web, introducing a government-run digital ID system that will enable it to even more closely censor and surveil the country’s 1 billion internet users.

China has enforced a “real-name registration” system for over a decade, meaning that Chinese internet companies almost always know the true identity of users who are, say, ordering a dress online, leaving a social media comment or playing a video game.

With the new centralized ID system, the Chinese government will take over the process. Users who submit a trove of personal information — including scans of their faces — will receive a unique code to access online accounts.

…

Nguyen Phong Hoang, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Canada who has studied the Great Firewall, said the digital ID could also pave the way for more personalized censorship, in which Beijing could ban content for specific people or populations in China.

“If this is successfully rolled out, we may reach a point where censorship happens at the personal level,” he said. “The granularity of control could increase dramatically.”

Digital IDs may even increase the risk of data breaches or hacks — despite the stated goal of the program — if China does not invest enough resources in protecting the personal data it collects for the system, Hoang said.

“They need to invest significant effort in securing the system and ensuring that the data is handled responsibly,” he said. “If an adversarial actor tries to access the personal data of Chinese citizens, the consequences could be severe — so the database must be well protected.”

There is precedent for this concern: In 2022, hackers claimed they had breached a Shanghai police database with personal data on more than 1 billion people, and they offered it for sale on the internet.