Ride-hailing giant Didi remains a sticky habit for Beijing drivers and passengers as people await security review outcome
- China’s cyberspace administration on Sunday removed Didi’s app from the country’s app stores until further notice
- The news has come as something of a shock to the ride-hailing giant’s users, many of whom use the household name’s app to get around
For 36-year-old driver Ping, who depends on Didi Chuxing’s app to find clients, the ride-hailing giant is a company too big to fail.
“There are more than 20,000 Didi drivers in Beijing alone. If it collapses, traffic will come to a standstill. Anyway, who doesn’t use the app these days?” said Ping, who only gave his surname and said he became a Didi driver in the Chinese capital city a month ago after a business failure in Zhangjiakou, a town in northern Hebei province.
China’s cyberspace administration on Sunday removed Didi’s app from the country’s app stores until further notice subject to correction and review, two days after the authority launched a cybersecurity review into Didi hot on the heels of its mega initial public offering in New York. The app remains functional for existing users although it stopped taking new customers as of July 3.
The news has come as something of a shock to the ride-hailing giant’s users. Ping said Didi is indispensable for city commuters and “almost everyone in big cities uses it”.
Charles Zhang, a Beijing resident who uses Didi at least five times a month, said he is not worried about personal data security. “There is no information security for people nowadays anyway. Our faces get scanned for facial recognition everywhere, and we are raided by junk calls everyday,” Zhang said.