Personal-data sales develop into a terrifying plague

As Hong Kong was up in arms last week over privacy concerns relating to the sale of Octopus cardholders' personal data, a court in Shanghai's Pudong district was making a landmark ruling over the sale of personal information.

On Thursday, the court sentenced nine people to jail terms of six months with a six-month reprieve to two years for selling 30 million items of personal data involving car owners, bank customers, policy-holders, and high-income businesspeople in Beijing and Changsha, Hunan .

This may be the biggest mainland case since the Criminal Law was amended in February last year to make the selling of personal data illegal. But the case did not make the headlines of either the state media or the more popular internet news portals.

This is too bad. Mainland authorities should have used the case as part of a media campaign to highlight the importance of privacy protection and to push for detailed laws and regulations in the area. Compared to dealing with floods and pollution, many officials may consider privacy a low priority, and some may see violations as non-issues.

But they are wrong. In this age of the internet and rapid advances in telecommunications, few things are more important than privacy protection, particularly as mainlanders become richer and the proud owners of apartments, cars and credit cards.

It's hard to find anyone on the mainland with a mobile phone these days who has not received numerous unsolicited phone calls or text messages from people trying to flog apartments, insurance policies, fake invoices, massages and so on. Some may be just nuisance cold sales calls, but others are truly frightening because the callers or senders appear to know very personal family details, such as names, jobs and addresses.

The truth is that any personal details put on a sales contract or a bank form can become commodities that are sold and resold many times.