• Local governments have been dismantling their coronavirus surveillance and tracking systems.
• With one Chinese city claiming to have erased one billion pieces of personal data.
• Wuxi is the first Chinese city to delete Covid data to improve privacy.

Following the controversial country-wide zero-Covid policy‘s abandonment, local governments have been gradually dismantling their coronavirus surveillance and tracking systems.

One Chinese city claims to have erased one billion pieces of personal data gathered during the outbreak.

The 7.5 million-person city of Wuxi, which is a manufacturing hub on China’s east coast, staged a ceremony on Thursday to get rid of Covid-related personal data, according to a statement posted on social media by the city’s public security agency.

The one billion pieces of data were merely the first batch of such information to be discarded, according to the statement.

They were gathered for objectives such as Covid tests, contact tracing, and the prevention of imported cases.

China gathers a tonne of information about its inhabitants, including their DNA and other bodily samples, as well as their movements on a massive network of surveillance cameras and the digital footprints they leave behind.

Yet, since the pandemic, state surveillance has intruded more deeply into Chinese residents’ private lives, leading to an unprecedented amount of data collecting.

Residents have been anxious about the security of the enormous amount of personal data collected by municipal governments after the zero-Covid limits were lifted, worried about possible data leaks or theft.

It was discovered in July of last year that a sizable online database believed to contain the personal information of up to one billion Chinese citizens had been left exposed and accessible to the public for more than a year before an anonymous hacker offered to sell the information and brought it to public light.

In the statement, Wuxi officials said “third-party audit and notary officers” would be invited to take part in the deletion process, to ensure it cannot be restored.

Wuxi also scrapped more than 40 local apps used for “digital epidemic prevention,” according to the statement.

These Covid applications ruled social and economic life in China during the pandemic, dictating when and where people could leave their homes, where they could go on trips, when businesses could operate, and where commodities could be carried.

Yet, most of these apps disappeared from daily life in December once the nation abruptly left zero-Covid.

China removed a national mobile tracking app that gathered information on users’ travel patterns on December 12.

Although they are no longer in use, many local pandemic applications maintained by municipal or provincial governments, like the commonplace Covid health code apps, have remained in existence.

The city of Wuxi claims to be the first in China to have deleted citizen personal data relating to Covid.

Users of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, urged other local administrations to follow similar.

The disposal, according to Yan Chunshui, deputy head of Wuxi’s big data management bureau, was done to improve privacy protection for citizens, stop data leaks, and free up storage space.

According to Kendra Schaefer, the head of digital policy research at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, data collecting for local-level Covid apps is frequently disorganised, and managing those apps for local governments is challenging and expensive.

“Considering the cost and difficulty managing such apps, coupled with concerns expressed by the public over data security and privacy – not to mention the political win local governments get by symbolically putting zero-Covid to bed – dismantling those systems is par for the course,” Schaefer said.

Scaling back simply makes economic sense because, as she continued, the big data teams at local governments were frequently overburdened dealing with Covid data.

“Many cities have not yet deleted their Covid data – or have not done so publicly – not because I believe they intend to keep it, but because it simply hasn’t been that long since zero-Covid was halted,” Schaefer said.

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