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Coronavirus pandemic
Tech

Beijing rolls out colour-coded QR system for coronavirus tracking despite concerns over privacy, inaccurate ratings

  • Beijing residents will be assigned coloured QR codes, with only those with green codes being able to move around the city freely
  • The system, which has been rolled out in more than 100 cities across the country, has been criticised for a lack of transparency and potential mislabelling

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A driver showing his green health code to enter an apartment complex in China. Photo: Handout
Minghe Hu

China’s capital city has joined a national initiative to assign residents coloured QR codes that determine whether they have to be quarantined, despite concerns of mislabelling and privacy leaks.

The QR code system, launched through Ant Financial’s Alipay in Hangzhou on February 11, assigns users one of three coloured QR codes – green, yellow and red. Chinese state media outlet Xinhua News reported that the system covered three provinces initially – Zhejiang, Sichuan and Hainan – and the municipality of Chongqing with a total population of nearly 180 million, and would soon cover the entire country. It had been adopted in over 100 cities across the country within a week, according to Xinhua.

In Beijing, the mini-program can be accessed both through Alipay and Tencent’s ubiquitous app WeChat. Users can obtain their codes by entering their name, national identity number and registering with facial recognition.

A green code shows the user is not under quarantine and can move around the city freely, but those with yellow and red codes need to quarantine themselves at home or undergo supervised quarantine respectively. The status of users’ colour codes is refreshed at midnight daily.

From next week, the program will also allow users to check the health codes of others by entering their identity numbers, according to a Xinhua report. This is to address the issue of people who do not have smartphones, such as the elderly or young children, Pan Feng, deputy chief of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, said at a press conference on Sunday.

Pan added that the programme would allow foreigners to check on their colour status using documentation aside from Chinese identification numbers “as soon as possible”.

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