According to the relevant requirements of the State Council's Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism Comprehensive Group, the "communication itinerary card" service was formally taken offline at 0:00 a.m. on December 13, 2022, and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CICT) has synchronized the deletion of all the itinerary card-related data in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations, so as to effectively safeguard the security of personal information.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology
December 13, 2022
Extended reading
What will happen to the health code when the travel card goes offline?
Communication trip cards are ending their mission after nearly three years of operation as preventative measures continue to be optimized.
After the Communication Trip Card service goes offline, all related user data will reportedly be completely deleted to eliminate data security risks. "The trip card has lost its significance, and taking it offline early is a positive thing." Chen Dongping, president of Shenzhen Smart City Big Data Research Institute, said in an interview with China Newsweek.
With the trip card offline, there is much concern about whether the health code, which is closely related to people's daily lives, will be withdrawn as well.
Trip card lacks precision
The communication trip card, or "communication big data trip card", also known as "trip card", was launched by the China Academy of Information and Communication Research (CAICR) in cooperation with China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, and went online on March 6, 2020. It was launched on March 6, 2020 by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom. Initially, users can open the WeChat app "Communication Itinerary Card", fill in their cell phone number and verification code, and obtain proof of their itinerary to the place they have visited for more than four hours in the past 14 days. The asterisk "*" on the itinerary card indicates that the user's trip in the past 14 days included cities in medium- and high-risk areas, but it does not mean that the user has actually visited these medium- and high-risk areas.
The itinerary card then went through a series of optimizations.
In September 2021, the national government service platform integrated the health code and itinerary code, fully realizing the one-page-passing "two codes in one" across the country, i.e., you can open the health code and view the itinerary at the same time.
From June 29, 2022 onwards, the "asterisk" mark on the communication itinerary card was abolished. "From July 8, the timeframe for inquiring about the communication trip card was shortened from 14 days to 7 days. As of May 26 this year, the data published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology trip card user inquiries accumulated to more than 55.6 billion times.
The original intention of the trip card was to support the reasonable mobility of personnel and the safe resumption of work and production. Chen Dongping said, but in the specific implementation of the trip card lack of precision, it is difficult to pinpoint the high-risk range to the county or district level and the following administrative areas.
Communication trip card public number in January this year in an article 12 trip card questions authoritative answer, mentioned that the trip card analyzes the cell phone signaling and billing data, by the operator through the user used by the cell phone number of the location of the base station to obtain. Due to technical reasons such as possible cross-coverage of base station signals, limited accuracy of signaling data, and delays in data updates, there may be some deviation in the data from the trip card service.
In response to the question "I haven't been to place A but it shows up / I've been to place B but it doesn't show up", the article answers that the trip card service uses base station data, and in order to ensure communication continuity and coverage without blind spots, the signals of the two base stations at the intersection of the administrative divisions may cross-coverage, resulting in the cell phone using a neighboring base station without roaming. This may cause the phone to use the signal of the neighboring city's base station without roaming. In addition, if you stay in a city for less than 4 hours, you will not be recorded.
In Chen Dongping's view, the big data application of tripcodes has been still at a very superficial stage, and has not been y excavated and extended. "For the trip code to be of practical use, it must be able to depict the electronic trajectory and length of time of the personnel's actions." Chen Dongping believes that this will involve processing a large amount of data, followed by increasing the comparison with a variety of other data. In his view, the technical aspects are doable, but will require great investment from operators.
Will health codes be withdrawn?
The trip code will soon be offline, and with the new Article 10 proposing "no longer checking negative nucleic acid test certificates and health codes for inter-regional migrants", what will happen to the health code?
Personal health code data including personal basic information, personal health information, each category contains different specific data entries. Taking the national standard "Personal Health Information Code Data Format" in the health code data structure as a reference, the health code covers a large amount of personal information.
Health codes in many parts of the country are developed by local governments with technical support provided by enterprises. "Each place has its own set of health codes, which cover a large amount of detailed personal data, and there is still no clear statement on where this data will go." A public health expert in China said. In his opinion, "the legal person role of some local health code operators is vague and lacks a clear party to take responsibility."
According to the media, the rules for assigning health codes are mainly formulated by provincial administrative units, and the competent units are not the same in different provinces. For example, Beijing "health treasure" competent unit for the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology Administration; Jiangsu Province "Sukang code" competent unit for the Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention; Hunan Province, the competent unit of health code for the Hunan Provincial Health Commission; and Liaoning Province, "Liaozitong" competent unit for the Liaoning Province, "Liaozitong" competent unit for the Liaoning Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The competent unit of "LiaoZhitong" is the Liaoning Provincial Business Environment Construction Bureau and the Provincial Information Center.
"When the epidemic hit in early 2020, there was an urgent need for digitized enterprises across the country to quickly build a health code system, which can be seen as a period of barbaric growth. Until now, despite the existence of some regulatory mechanisms, it cannot be ruled out that some enterprises have access to personal data." Chen Dongping said that behind the health code involves hundreds of millions of people's personal information, including detailed flow information, payment information, commuting information, etc., which can affect national security once leaked. This requires relevant departments to regulate the third-party operators involved.
There has been no uniformity in the form of health codes around the world, and the functions of health codes have been gradually expanded and increasingly generalized. In some areas, health codes are integrated into local medical services, public **** transportation, and even payment methods.
November 9, the National Health Commission and other departments jointly issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" national health informatization, mentioned that by 2025, the initial construction of the formation of a unified and authoritative, interconnected national health information platform support and guarantee system, the basic realization of the public medical and health institutions and the national health information platform connection Full coverage. Each resident has a dynamically managed electronic health record and a fully functional electronic health code. This news triggered a heated debate.
Since then, people close to the National Health Commission have responded to the media, saying that the so-called "e-health code" is not the "health code" used during the epidemic prevention and control. Epidemic prevention and control "health code" is mainly used for epidemic prevention and control, associated with the new crown vaccination, nucleic acid testing information; "e-health code" is mainly used for medical and health services, including identification, settlement, service functions, associated with the residents of the electronic health records, electronic medical records and other medical services information, has been implemented for many years. It has been implemented for many years.
In Chen Dongping's view, "Since the epidemic, the health code has really played a relatively large role."
"The data that really belongs to the data collected after the epidemic is mainly nucleic acid test data and place code information, and now the key is what to do next with these two types of retained data." Zheng Lei, a professor at Fudan University's School of International Relations and Public **** Affairs and director of the Digital and Mobile Governance Laboratory, said in an interview with the first financial reporter. "With the landing of the new ten articles, data like nucleic acid information and place codes should be destroyed, sealed or completely desensitized." Zheng Lei explained.
Chen Dongping suggested that in the future, consideration could be given to further improving the privacy protection data mechanism, and responsibilities like the storage and management of health code data should be given to the national authority to undertake. But on the other hand, he did not suggest a full integration of such huge information data and painting a specific portrait, which is also rare globally.
The handling of personal information, from the national to the local level, has introduced clear regulations. According to Article 6 of the General Provisions of the Personal Information Protection Act: Personal information shall be handled with a clear and reasonable purpose and in a manner that minimizes the impact on the rights and interests of individuals. The collection of personal information shall be limited to the minimum extent necessary to achieve the purpose of processing, and shall not be excessive.
The State Council's Comprehensive Group of Joint Prevention and Control Mechanisms issued the Interim Measures for the Management and Service of Health Codes for the Prevention and Control of the New Crown Pneumonia Epidemic in January 2021, Article 24 of which makes it clear that the protection of personal privacy should be strengthened, and that personal information collected for the prevention and control of the epidemic and the prevention and control of the disease should not be used for other purposes.
Zheng Lei said in an interview, the future health code should first return to the use of health for health purposes, such as medical care without a health insurance card, health code brush health insurance card, scanning code registration and payment. Health code future application scenarios can be implemented in this direction, and is non-compulsory to use, just to provide the public with a variety of options. However, there are also views that, with the end of the epidemic prevention and control, the current use of health codes, it is logical to exit the stage of history. There is a lot of uncertainty about the damage that health codes can do to personal information or privacy.
Chen Dongping believes that when big data is abused, it will only lead to localities investing more resources in terms of money and manpower, making the prevention and control of epidemics deviate from the direction of precision. The misuse of data under the guise of big data precision epidemic prevention should be brought to an end.
Reporter: Niu Huo