China, coronavirus and surveillance: the messy reality

Although China has tools that many other governments would not be able to usually deploy to track potentially infected people, such as location data from individual phones and facial recognition technology, the state’s ability to access personal data is at times limited.

Co-ordination between different areas of the public sector is often sporadic and sometimes marred by bureaucratic rivalries — as the experience of the two Guangdong towns shows. Wary of alienating middle-class customers, whose lives now revolve around a series of apps on their smartphones, many private sector companies are reluctant to be seen handing over data.

Full article: China, coronavirus and surveillance: the messy reality – Getaka