The Cyberspace Administration of China has called upon Alipay over public concerns on personal privacy, media reported on Wednesday.
As the online payment platform of e-commerce giant Alibaba, Alipay has been awash in criticism of privacy infringement together with its online credit-scoring system Zhima Credit in light of Alipay's annual spending report incident earlier this month.
File photo
In the beginning of 2018, Alipay released a "personal spending report" for all its clients. However, a statement invovling collecting personal data of clients, which was supposed to acquire users' agreements at first, has been put in extremely small font size with an already ticked "agree" for users. This action was noticed by a lawyer and sparked wide concerns on personal information protection on social media.
Screenshot of Alipay's annual spending report. The already ticked item involving personal data collecting is marked in blue
The Cyberspace Administration criticized the two companies' breach of its commitment to protect personal information and urged the platforms to improve management, take effective measures and prevent similar incidents.
Alipay and Zhima Credit said that they will find the root causes and rectify the faults as required by the regulators.
(Compiled by Li Lei)
