China issued a wanted poster for two Taiwanese men. Included on the notice were their Taiwanese national ID numbers. To find out how Beijing might have obtained such personal information, TaiwanPlus spoke to Crystal Tu from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
00:00China has issued bounties for two Taiwanese citizens, and on that bounty announcement, they actually have the Taiwanese ID numbers for those individuals that they're targeting. How do you think China got that information?
00:14Taiwan has a centralized household register data set system, and it has been in the interest for commercial or criminal usage for acquired data set for target types.
00:30So it is known to have several data sets outside circulating in the darknet.
00:36China has been actively collecting the national level's whole citizen level of information, not just in Taiwan.
00:46There is also a previous case for Office of Personnel Management in the U.S. federal employees.
00:54They tried to acquire the entire data set for U.S. government employees.
00:58So I think that's the general pattern we see from China to do, you know, this kind of large scale data collections worldwide.
01:06In Taiwan's case, we see that the ID numbers got leaked, but is there any other information that's at risk, be it personal or other?
01:15For Taiwan specifically, it's household registry. That's household registry will be not just about your IDs, about all your relatives and where you live, and that's extremely sensitive information.
01:28And the second part is that Taiwan has the world known health insurance system, and that health insurance system also connects a lot of the personal data about the personal medical records or something.
01:41And the third part is less known, but is in the commercial sector is online shopping, because we know that China has a lot of online shopping platforms that try to expand their business.
01:52So let's collect the people's shopping behaviors and their financial transaction data or all other things.
01:59And combined with their data, it's not just about separated data.
02:04It's about how they pitch everything together and try to create a kind of personalized how people behave.
02:12So I think that's the three data sets I have in mind that cover different aspects.
02:18With these new developments, how can people protect themselves and their personal information?
02:23So first, I will say Taiwan, a lot of the information systems here in Taiwan have kind of a tendency to using these national ID numbers as indicators.
02:36But many of the systems actually do not necessarily need these national ID as an identifier for people.
02:45There's other options like emails or just cell phone numbers.
02:50So people need to be aware of that to avoid posting the kind of information that is actually a way to protect not just yourself and also all the others related to you to avoid the data being collected.
03:06And for example, the data being collected is a way to acknowledge the data being collected.
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