On December 14, Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd. was fined 100,000 yuan by the Shanghai Xuhui District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau on December 3 this year, because the sales company of Xiaopeng Automobile illegally collected 431,600 face photos in the six months from January to June this year by using surveillance cameras installed in stores.
In the administrative penalty decision, it is written that the party, Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd., purchased 22 camera equipment with face recognition functions from a company, with a total hardware and software procurement cost of 173,800 yuan, and after the parties paid for these devices, they installed the facial recognition data of consumers in their stores for the financial season, uploaded the data to the company's back-end system, and identified the facial data through the algorithm developed by the company, so as to conduct store passenger flow statistics and passenger flow analysis. Including statistics on the number of people entering the store, the ratio of men to women, age analysis, etc.
It is reported that Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales service Company installs face recognition camera equipment in 7 of its stores, so that on average, at least 3 cameras in each store are capturing the faces of the passenger flow, and their collection of consumer facial recognition data is not explicit or informed of the purpose of collection and use without the consent of consumers.
Xiaopeng Automobile's move infringed on the relevant rights and interests of consumers, so it was punished.
But at present, there are also some voices on the Internet questioning, half a year of illegal collection of more than 430,000 face photos, and finally only fined 100,000 yuan, is it too light?
In addition, the penalty decision also revealed that Xiaopeng Automobile's company in Shanghai has purchased the store passenger flow monitoring project service since March 1, 2019, and somehow, finally only counted the data collected in half a year to collect face photos.
At this year's 315 party, CCTV once exposed software companies such as Suzhou Wandian Palm with the theme of "Who is Stealing My "Face"", installing face recognition devices for offline business stores and grabbing customer face information.
At that time, many well-known offline brands, such as Good Shop and Kohler Sanitary Ware, were also exposed, all of which were using technical means to grab users' faces.
Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd. was counted as capturing more than 430,000 face photos from January to June this year, indicating that they were still using similar technology to collect face information after the 315 party was exposed.
A netizen also questioned Xiaopeng Automobile whether it was knowing the law and breaking the law.
According to public information, the legal representative of Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales service Co., Ltd. is Zhu Yanhua, who is also a supervisor of Xiaopeng Automobile Company and serves as a legal representative in hundreds of Xiaopeng Automobile sales and service companies.
On November 23 this year, Xiaopeng Automobile released its third quarter financial report of this year, and in the three months ended September 30, 2021, Xiaopeng Automobile delivered 25,666 vehicles, ranking first among the three companies of Wei Xiaoli, while Xiaopeng Automobile had 271 sales stores at that time, covering 95 cities.
Xiaopeng Motors recently revealed that by the end of this year, the number of stores they plan to sell will exceed 350, which is more than the number of 300 stores predicted by He Xiaopeng when the first quarter of this year was released.
It can be seen that the pace of opening a store of Xiaopeng Automobile is still accelerating.
Finally, we also hope that Xiaopeng Automobile can protect the user's personal privacy while continuously expanding the number of its sales stores, and stop illegally grabbing the user's face information.