Hello Inc. and 58.com Summoned for Collecting Extra Personal Information

Recently, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center found that 17 mobile applications had shown privacy irregularities and had violated the provisions of the Network Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law.

The illegal mobile applications mainly involve the following non-compliance situations. Hello Inc., Yitongxing, and others, failed to inform users of all the privacy rights requested by the apps. Personal information provided by the apps to third parties is not anonymous, such as Hello Inc. and real estate agency, 58.com.

Some apps have been shown to begin collecting personal information before obtaining the user’s consent and then fail to provide effective functions for correcting personal information or canceling user accounts. Other apps failed to establish and publish personal information security complaints and reporting channels.

On November 3 this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reported 38 illegal apps, including 58.com, for “collecting personal information beyond the necessary scope”. Yang Lei, CEO of Hello Inc., said at the company’s fifth anniversary get together in September of this year, that the latest cumulative registered users of Hello Inc. in China were close to 500 million.

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In view of the above situation, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center reminds mobile phone users to carefully download and use the above mentioned mobile apps. In addition, users should not agree to unnecessary privacy rights nor enter any private information.