No emoji, no title party, something to say, welcome to pay attention
Because of the illegal collection of more than 430,000 pieces of face information, Xiaopeng Automobile was administratively punished by the Shanghai Xuhui District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau of 100,000 yuan.
In-depth understanding of the specific details of this punishment case will find that similar illegal scenes are not isolated cases, and have even penetrated into the capillaries of life, and what is even more paradoxical is that people are not strange and accustomed to some face scenes suspected of violating the law. This is clearly worth vigilance.
The specific details of the case are disclosed in the administrative punishment decision.
The penalty decision shows that the party to the penalty is Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd., and its parent company, Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Co., Ltd., is the signatory of the contract.
In 2019, Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Co., Ltd. signed the "Framework Contract for Passenger Flow Monitoring Projects in Xiaopeng Automobile Stores" with a company, which stipulates that the parties shall purchase store passenger flow monitoring project services from a company from March 1, 2019.
The specific company is not stated in the penalty decision, but on December 14, Xiaopeng Automobile issued an apology statement saying that it "mistakenly purchased and used the products of a third-party supplier (Yolok) that violated the relevant legal provisions", and pointed out that the third-party supplier was: Yoroko.
Public information shows that "Yo-Rook" belongs to Shanghai Yo-Rook Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. Founded in 2009, the company is an artificial intelligence company that claims to have a number of advanced artificial intelligence technologies such as face recognition, humanoid detection, mouse detection, behavior analysis, and object recognition.
Search for "Yo-Roke", you can also find more information about Yo-Rook, for example: in 2021, CCTV "3·15" party named a number of companies that provide face recognition cameras, including "Yo-Rook". The manager of the program", "Yoroko", said at the time that as long as the customer has been to any of the more than 100 4S stores of the car company involved, the face information will be mastered.
It is not an exaggeration to describe it as "extremely frightening".
Speaking of Xiaopeng Automobile being fined, the passenger flow monitoring project service agreed in the contract is to collect the passenger flow data and face information of the store consumers.
The collected data is uploaded to the back-end system of Yoroko, and then the facial data is identified and calculated through the algorithm developed by Yolok, so as to carry out the customer flow statistics and passenger flow analysis of the store, including the statistics of the number of people entering the store, the proportion of men and women, and the age analysis.
At this time, the customer flow data and face data of the consumers who arrived at the store were not directly given to the party Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd.
The parties concerned need to purchase the system services of Yolok Company at the same time, open the corresponding account, and log in to the "so-and-so" software developed by Yolok Company to view the above-mentioned store passenger flow statistics and analysis results, which are used as a reference in the company's operation.
One question worth paying attention to is, what exactly does the passenger flow statistics and analysis results include, is it a simple number of people, the proportion of men and women, age analysis and other demographic analysis of people who do not involve specific individuals? Or can we use face recognition to pin down who the specific individual is, and conduct marking analysis on consumers to provide them with marketing promotion? There is a clear difference between the two. The latter already involves use cases such as consumers' sensitive personal information, which is more risky for ordinary consumers.
Unfortunately, this important issue has not been disclosed in detail. But obviously, this issue is very important, and Xiaopeng Motors took the initiative to respond to this doubt in its apology statement.
Xiaopeng Motors said that there is no leakage or illegal use of personal information, and only through non-personal digital data such as the number of passenger visits as a reference for business conditions.
According to Xiaopeng Automobile's response, only through the non-personal digital data such as the number of passenger visits as a reference for business conditions, it did not further analyze, match, and promote face information for marketing.
In addition, the penalty letter also disclosed that after investigation, the parties purchased a total of 22 camera equipment with face recognition functions from a company, the model number was F3, and the hardware and software procurement fees totaled 173822.77 yuan.
The above-mentioned face recognition camera equipment is all installed in the stores of the parties concerned, involving 5 directly operated stores and 2 franchise stores, opening 8 system accounts, and from January to June 2021, the above-mentioned face recognition camera equipment collects and uploads a total of 431623 face photos.
The penalty letter also said that as of the occurrence of the case, the parties had dismantled the face recognition camera equipment in the above-mentioned stores, and the uploaded face photos had been deleted by a company.
According to the administrative punishment decision, the Xuhui District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau found that the parties' behavior violated the provisions of the first paragraph of Article 29 of the Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law, ordered the company to correct the illegal behavior, and fined him 100,000 yuan.
Reviewing the Law on the Protection of The Rights and Interests of Consumers, the first paragraph of article 29 of the Law provides: "Proprietors collecting and using consumers' personal information shall follow the principles of legality, propriety, and necessity, clearly indicate the purpose, method, and scope of information collection and use, and obtain the consent of consumers." Proprietors collecting or using consumers' personal information shall disclose their rules for collection and use, and must not collect or use information in violation of the provisions of laws and regulations and the agreements of both parties. ”
The Personal Information Protection Law also has relevant provisions, of which Article 26 stipulates: "The installation of image collection and personal identification equipment in public places shall be necessary for maintaining public safety, comply with relevant national regulations, and set up conspicuous prompt signs." Personal images and identification information collected may only be used for the purpose of maintaining public safety and shall not be used for other purposes, except where the individual's separate consent is obtained. ”
In the case of Xiaopeng Automobile being fined, the parties installed face recognition camera equipment in 7 of its stores to collect consumer facial recognition data, and without the consent of consumers, they did not explicitly or inform consumers of the purpose of collection and use.
The case of Xiaopeng Motors is not alone. In recent years, face recognition has blossomed everywhere, such as: face recognition access control in the community, flow monitoring statistics in shopping malls and supermarkets, face recognition monitoring at sales offices, and so on. Last year, there were media reports that some local sales offices installed face recognition systems to distinguish between customers who naturally visited customers and customers from channels such as second-hand housing intermediaries.
There are many similar cases, many of which have the situation that face information is collected without the explicit authorization of users or consumers, which is obviously suspected of violating laws and regulations and deserves a warning from the whole industry. Don't stop in time when you touch a legal red line without knowing it, or knowing that you may cross a legal red line.
So, the question is, when face information is abused, do we know how to protect our faces?
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