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Privacy protection for express delivery needs to be strengthened on the 'chain'

2025-05-09   

According to an investigation by reporters from the Rule of Law Daily, privacy breaches have become a persistent problem in the food delivery industry. In recent years, issues such as food delivery personnel secretly taking photos of users' home environments and the circulation of express waybill information on the black market have been frequently exposed. Some people may find it strange that delivery drivers and couriers only have necessary information such as the recipient's name, address, and virtual number at most? Actually, it's not like that. A survey shows that 90% of personal information can be restored through the name, phone number, and address on the express waybill. In particular, through the mobile phone number, you can find the bound WeChat, Alipay and other platform accounts, so as to understand personal interest preferences and consumption habits. So, how to 'hide' personal information? Encryption processing. Specifically, it is the use of virtual numbers and other identification technologies to encrypt personal information on express waybills, and the processed waybills are called privacy waybills. The courier can only contact the recipient through a specific app and cannot directly identify the phone number. However, technology has always been just a tool. To some extent, the entities that utilize technological tools and the institutional environment that safeguards technological governance are the crucial factors. Once there are problems with the governing body and institutional environment, it is difficult to ensure the presence of "technology" to guarantee the presence of "governance". From the perspective of the entire process, the express delivery chain includes various links such as merchant labeling, warehouse sorting, package picking and subcontracting, transit delivery, and terminal stations. On this long chain, there are multiple entities involved in processing personal information, with a wide range of aspects and a large amount of data. As long as there is a loophole in any of the operational steps, personal information may be leaked. In the past, in the field of food delivery and express delivery, the online black and gray industry could drag the entire user database of a company, causing information leakage such as phone numbers, recipient names, and addresses. Some express delivery companies have lost their "backyard", and criminals have hacked into backend servers from relay stations. Thousands of citizens' personal information have been quietly uploaded to online storage and resold through remote control. The existence of "insiders" and "hackers" indirectly proves that the "institutional fence" is not firmly tied, and some people are still "dozing off" on their posts. Of course, convenience and safety are often contradictory. The survey shows that at the operational level, the implementation of privacy waybills has indeed affected the convenience of some end delivery processes. For example, a courier needs to scan specific information with a handheld terminal before delivering. When consumers choose information encryption, the virtual number on the privacy waybill will be blocked or rejected. Some collection points do not yet have automatic information sorting functions, making it impossible to classify and store parcels through privacy labels. For enterprises that only focus on efficiency and profit, these factors may become obstacles to improving technological governance efficiency. For the sake of so-called delivery convenience and disregarding the harm of personal information security, food delivery and express delivery companies may inevitably wear the hat of "inaction". In fact, popularizing privacy labels is a complete transformation of the entire industry chain. Delivery companies and e-commerce platforms need to work together to make maximizing user privacy a "selling point" for winning the market, truly shifting from "competing for traffic" to "competing for services". For example, jointly promoting the standardization of information data processing, breaking down "information silos" and "data chimneys" throughout the entire process, making end services more standardized and convenient, and implementing the social responsibility of privacy protection in every detail. (New Society)

Edit:Luo yu Responsible editor:Jia jia

Source:Guangzhou Daily

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