Some people are economically damaged, some people are dusty, and why the enterprise inquiry platform frequently overturns

"Last week, I participated in a domestic bidding for the top 500, was preparing the bid, sharpened the knife to get a multi-million dollar order, and was woken up early in the morning by the company's docking person, which informed me of bad news: the enterprise inspection software showed that my shares in the company were frozen." Recently, a netizen named "Brother Gun" told his experience on corporate query software on social media.

The actual situation is that one of the partners of "Brother Gun" is a shareholder of another company, but that company is enforced by the court for poor management and debts, and it is very coincidental that the legal representative of the company has the same name as "Brother Gun", and as a result, on the business inquiry platform, "Brother Gun" is regarded as the legal representative of that company, and at the same time associates it with three companies that have nothing to do with him. The bidder obtained this information through the enterprise inquiry software, so it made a negative evaluation of the "gun brother" and his company. So, "lying at home, doing nothing, just become an executor."

The encounter of "Brother Cannon" is not an isolated case. The first financial reporter's investigation found that on the China Judgment Document Network and the Black Cat Complaint Network, there are not a few lawsuits and complaints involving the enterprise inquiry platform, and the affected subjects include not only individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises, but also well-known and large enterprises such as 360 and Sinopec.

Some commercial inquiry platforms have claimed that their mission is to promote information fairness and transparency with technology and help the construction of a social credit system, and the market has also responded positively to this, but with the continuous emergence of Oolong incidents, there are more voices of doubt and concern.

Oolong constantly

A person named "Gao Maohua" also had a similar encounter with "Brother Gun".

According to a civil ruling on the China Judgment Documents Network, the plaintiff, Wuhan Zhongke Ruixuan Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd., found the following erroneous information in the software enterprise investigation and WeChat Mini Program operated by the defendant Qichacha Technology Co., Ltd.: Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd. and Tibet Xincheng Yue Property Service Co., Ltd. due to a dispute over the entrustment contract, Gao Maohua, the legal representative of Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd., was ruled by the Zhongyuan District People's Court of Zhengzhou City on December 17, 2020 to restrict consumption. In the personal profile of Gao Maohua, the legal representative of Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd., it is written that "Gao Maohua, the founder of Zhongke Ruixuan".

In fact, Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd. had no relationship with the plaintiff, and the legal representative was only the same name and surname and not the same person. Without confirming and verifying with the plaintiff, the defendant arbitrarily and arbitrarily made the erroneous judgment that the plaintiff had an association with Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd. solely by virtue of the fact that the legal representative had the same name and surname, and published the results of the erroneous subjective judgment to the public. The defendant's erroneous judgment of relevance caused the plaintiff's legal representative to be mistaken for a judgment defaulter, and the social evaluation of the plaintiff and its legal representative was questioned.

Wuhan Zhongke Ruixuan Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. pointed out that as of the date of filing the complaint, the basic information of the plaintiff and Zhongcai (Hubei) Industrial Co., Ltd. had been viewed 7216 times and 4441 times on the enterprise inspection, respectively.

As a result, the plaintiff put forward a demand for a public apology, financial compensation, and refund of membership fees.

Such oolong events are not alone. For example, on May 5, 2019, Qichacha pushed the news to subscribers that Chongqing Ant Small and Micro Micro Loan Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Ant Financial, had begun liquidation, and listed the risk level of the information as "warning information". In this regard, Ant Financial said that the above-mentioned liquidation information is actually historical information in 2015, and the enterprise investigation published incorrect information, which misled the outside world, so it was suspected of unfair competition and took the investigation to court.

Similar problems are not unique to a single platform. When the first financial reporter entered relevant keywords on the black cat complaint platform, a number of similar cases popped up.

For example, on October 1, 2021, a netizen complained: "The legal person of Hunan Tangzhu Construction Labor Service Co., Ltd. in the enterprise investigation platform shows that it is my name, and it is associated with other enterprises of mine." In fact I don't have any relationship with this company, I'm currently talking about investing... This led to a gap between me and my partner, which eventually led to a failure to negotiate. On October 15 of the same year, Qi cha cha replied on the black cat complaint platform: "The information has been disassociated, very sorry." ”

On November 8, 2021, some netizens complained that Tianyancha entered its phone as a contact for a number of supermarkets, resulting in long-term receipt of various sales harassment calls from pigs, cattle, sheep, chickens, feed, and fertilizer, and often insomnia due to this. Later, when the netizen went to the local industrial and commercial bureau to inquire, he found that the contact number entered by these supermarkets when registering was not their mobile phone number, but Tianyan checked that he had recorded it wrong. Tianyancha replied to this on the black cat complaint platform, but the content of the reply chose "hidden content".

The same case also occurred in Qixinbao. In 2020, some netizens complained that Qixinbao put his personal contact information on other corporate web pages, resulting in countless people calling him every day, seriously interfering with his own life.

In public reports, similar oolong incidents are not in the minority.

On March 5, 2020, Tianyan's investigation showed that Chen Jie stepped down as the legal representative of Tuniu Information and was succeeded by Zhu Chunye. In addition, Zhu Chunye also served as the legal representative of 4 enterprises, including Jiangsu Tuzhi Information Technology Co., Ltd. However, on March 12 of the same year, the relevant person in charge of Tuniu responded that this was just a normal change of the company.

On April 17, 2020, Sinopec Group Sales Industry Co., Ltd. issued a statement saying that recently, the Beijing Enterprise Credit Information Network, Tianyancha, Qichacha, Qixinbao and other enterprise information inquiry platforms registered "Sinopec Group Sales Industrial Co., Ltd." as the sole shareholder of "China Overseas Guolong Group Co., Ltd." The information was untrue, and the relevant responsible parties will be held accountable according to law.

On April 21, 2020, 360 Finance said that due to tianyancha's continuous release of "Zhou Hongyi stepped down as chairman of 360 Finance, his assistant Hong Zhao took over" and "360 Financial Senior Management Change: Zhou Hongyi stepped down as chairman of 360 Financial Services, Wu Haisheng and Jin Mingyi were added as directors" and other series of reporting articles from April 21, such series of reports were seriously inconsistent with the facts, and said that they were ready to sue.

In response to the "360 Finance is ready to sue Tianyancha", Tianyancha responded: Because the information of 360 financial entities has not been published to the public, the information on its platform is different from 360 Financial's point of view, and it is not fabricated or data errors. Tianyancha respects the official statement of 360 Finance and apologizes for the trouble that the incident may have brought to the 360 Financial team.

In addition, in 2020 alone, a number of business inquiry platforms have seen endless news about "Huang Zhang's withdrawal from Meizu shareholders", "Zong Qinghou stepped down as an executive director of Wahaha", "Heilan Home established a new company for semiconductor equipment", "Dong Mingzhu quit Yinlong New Energy", but they were quickly denied by related companies.

Technical and mechanical pitfalls

Many enterprise investigation platforms have declared that they should take it as their mission to "see the world fairly", but why is there constantly information oolong?

This may be related to the inherent flaws of the enterprise inspection platform. "It is too much reliance on technology, and only rely on technology for information screening, and mistakes are inevitable." Some people who are familiar with the operation of the enterprise inspection platform can put it in a word.

Different from the traditional national enterprise information credit publicity system, the commercial inquiry platform has obtained hundreds of millions of social entities across the country through various channels, and the data dimensions of many entities even exceed more than 300 kinds, which cover important data related to the operation and reputation of the entities involved, such as enterprise background, enterprise scale, development history, listing information, intellectual property rights, judicial risks, business conditions and related risks.

In the advertising of these commercial inquiry platforms, they mainly use public information, using big data, artificial intelligence and other technical means to make the public information of enterprises "live". The customer service staff of Qichacha and Tianyancha told the first financial reporter that all the information obtained by the platform is automatically crawled through big data and the company's unique related technology.

"Commercial query platforms usually use crawler technology to capture data content and update synchronously from the public platforms of relevant state departments." Yan Huaizhi, director of the Institute of Computer Network Offensive and Defensive Countermeasures of Beijing Institute of Technology, said in an interview with the first financial reporter.

The First Instance Civil Judgment of The Commercial Defamation Dispute between Zhejiang Ant Small and Micro Financial Services Group Co., Ltd., Chongqing Ant Small and Micro Micro Loan Co., Ltd., and Suzhou Langdong Network Technology Co., Ltd., published by the China Judgment Documents Network in 2020, has such a description: The core principle of enterprise investigation is to crawl enterprise information from the official websites of government agencies such as the National Industrial and Commercial Information Website and other government agencies through crawler technology to form a commercial information report, which is provided to B-end enterprises and C-end users.

The so-called web crawler (also known as the web spider), in fact, is a common information automatic acquisition program on the network, is the core technology of various information search, its role is to access and batch crawl the Internet pages, pictures, audio, video and other related data content on the Internet through the URL (unified resource positioning system), and then store and process the data after the data is collected.

According to Yan Huaizhi, the advantages of crawler technology are that the crawling speed is fast, the scale is large, and the adaptability is strong, and it can be adjusted in time according to the grasping strategy of the platform. But reptile technology also has its own drawbacks and risks. "Many websites provide unstructured data, post-crawl analysis is complex and difficult, and platforms face tremendous pressure to integrate data. Many websites have adopted an anti-crawling mechanism, resulting in increased crawling difficulty, and sometimes even crawled to fake data deliberately provided by the website, resulting in a great reduction in the authenticity of crawling information. ”

In Yan Huaizhi's view, there are many reasons for the phenomenon of information errors in commercial platforms. For example, although crawler technology can help the platform quickly capture massive amounts of information, some of this information may have errors at the source, and if you blindly become an information "porter", it is naturally difficult to escape the error.

People who understand the operation mechanism of the enterprise inspection platform introduced that there are two points in the process of these platforms grasping information through crawler technology, one is indiscriminate capture, the other is only to capture public information, the former may lead to information mixing, the latter limits the inability to capture non-public information such as ID cards, the combination of the two, once the information with the same name appears, it is difficult to distinguish; even if some platforms introduce third-party information (such as "partners") through technology for cross-comparison, but once they encounter a coincidence such as "Gun Brother", Nor can it be distinguished.

In his article, "Brother Gun" suggested that a verification mechanism should be established for the information captured, including manual verification.

When asked why the platform often has data and information errors, the customer service staff of the two enterprise inspection platforms told the first financial reporter that the data captured by the platform cannot guarantee complete accuracy, but provides a reference to the user. They also said that as long as the data and information involved are wrong, users can directly feedback with the platform, and then modify and update after the platform verifies that it is true.

Yan Huaizhi said that as a third-party query platform, commercial query platforms are sometimes "porters" of raw data, and sometimes they are "producers" of aggregated data, and there is a certain error rate when providing query data results, which is still a certain gap from their claim of "fairness to see the world".

Red fire and blemishes

In China, 2014 is an important year in the development of the business information inquiry market.

In June of that year, the State Council issued the Outline of the Planning for the Establishment of the Social Credit System (2014-2020), which is the first guiding document for the national level to deploy and accelerate the construction of a social credit system, and is an important top-level design for the construction of China's social credit system. The Interim Regulations on the Disclosure of Enterprise Information, which came into effect on October 1 of the same year, allowed enterprise information to be continuously opened.

It was in 2014 that big data business query platforms based on enterprise public information such as Tianyancha, Qichacha, and Qixinbao appeared one after another. "That can be said to be the first year of the business inquiry platform," an employee of a certain enterprise said in an interview with the first financial reporter, "At that time, many people in the industry felt that the spring of the business inquiry platform had come." ”

In the following years, business inquiry platforms such as Wind News, Enterprise Inquiry Treasure, YiqiCha, Qixinbao, Waterdrop Credit, and Grande Credit have successively appeared.

According to the "2021 China Business Inquiry Industry Research Report" released by Ai Media Consulting, the scale of China's business inquiry users will reach 479 million in 2020 and is expected to increase to 589 million in 2022. The report shows that among the business inquiry platforms, Tianyancha occupies 72.4% of the active user share, Qichacha ranks second with a share of 17.6%, and Qixinbao ranks third with a share of 6.5%.

Due to the characteristics of information transparency and data aggregation, enterprise inspection platforms are trusted and relied upon by more and more people, and these platforms are also favored by capital.

According to the public information inquiry, the first financial reporter found that as the three head platforms of the commercial inquiry platform, Tianyancha, Qichacha and Qixinbao have all obtained financing.

Among them, Tianyancha has a total of 3 financing processes, the angel round financing transaction amount in 2015 is 25 million yuan, the investor is Tengye Venture Capital; the A round financing transaction amount in 2017 is 130 million yuan, the investor is the National Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Development Fund; the pre-B round of financing in 2019 has not disclosed the transaction amount, and the investors are Zhong Ding Capital, Hongdao Capital and Weiran Capital.

There are 7 financing processes in the enterprise investigation, the amount of angel financing transactions in 2015 is 2.2 million yuan, the investor is Jianfeng K2VC; the same in 2015, the pre-A round financing transaction amount is 10 million yuan, the investor is Chuangdong Investment, Flintstone Capital; in 2016, the amount of the A round financing transaction is 50 million yuan, the investors are Yongjin Group, Suzhou High-tech Venture Capital, SuDa Tiangong Venture Capital, etc.; the 2017 Pre-B round undisclosed transaction amount, the investor is Suzhou Shandeng Trading Co., Ltd., Chongqing Xijian Enterprise Management Partnership; 2018 Series B financing and 2019 Pre-C round financing did not disclose the transaction amount, the investors were Beijing Cultural Investment, Pengyuan Zhengxin and Wenhua Haihui; the 2019 Series C financing transaction amount was 500 million yuan, and the investors were Wonder Investment and Xingfu Capital.

The financing process that Qixinbao can find is only once, from the merger and acquisition in 2015, the transaction amount is 30 million yuan, and the investor is Hehe Information.

The market is getting bigger and bigger, and the financing is getting bigger and bigger, but the problem of homogenization is becoming more and more obvious – even mistakes like information oolong are similar.

In Yan Huaizhi's view, in the era of digital economy, data resources have become one of the most important core elements. The basic premise for the existence and development of the commercial query platform is that it can establish a sound and perfect data security and trust system. Reducing data and information errors is an unavoidable and necessary problem for the development of commercial query platforms.

"Brother Gun" said in his article, "Massive collection of data, do not obtain data verification mechanism with any of the included enterprises, that is to say, you are included and will not notify you, and if the data is wrong, the enterprise investigation software will push the responsibility to the end, saying that it is all grabbed from the law enforcement website, it will not be wrong." He suggested that the model of free crawling information by the enterprise inspection platform should be changed, and the platform should pay a fee to the party who has been captured.

People familiar with the operation of the enterprise inspection platform pointed out that the business model of selling free crawled information, but not the fidelity of the goods sold, is the current technical and commercial quality of these platforms.