China Focus: Real name parcel delivery, security guarantee or privacy threat?

BEIJING -- Personal identification and contact details will be required in order to send parcels starting from next Monday as part of a new policy that has evoked concern nationwide.

The decision was announced as a security measure by the government earlier this month after several letter bombs killed at least seven people and injured dozens more in Liucheng County, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Sept. 30 and Oct.1.

Delivery service staff are also required to check the goods before packaging and all envelopes and parcels must be X-rayed.

"We will use the strictest measures to ensure the safety of packages," said Han Ruilin, an official with the State Post Bureau.

The new measure has created widespread concern over potential personal information leakage.

"After we gave birth to our babies, someone called us to promote baby care products. After we bought our cars, someone called to promote automobile accessories," said You Qian in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

She believed personalized monitoring of delivered goods would betray people's purchasing habits "so that people will know what to promote, or, worse, pose a risk to our personal safety."

Her anxiety is not ungrounded.

According to a report by the Internet Society of China released in July, more than 78 percent of web users reported their personal information such as real names, education, home address, ID card number and workplace had been leaked at some point.

Such leaks were responsible for scams and junk mail that resulted in economic losses of more than 80.5 billion yuan (about 12.7 billion U.S. dollars) last year, or roughly 124 yuan per person.

"If they know my mobile phone number, my ID card number and my address, they might be able to change my PayPal password," said Mao Wei, a resident in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province.

Chang Shan, general manager of Arip Logistics in Xinyang, Henan Province, worries that clients will not cooperate.

"They don't want to show us their ID cards," he said.

Ma Shuping, a vendor on Alibaba's business-to-consumer platform Taobao.com, said, "Supporting measures should also be taken to protect people's privacy."

Zhu Xuehai, research fellow with the Qinghai provincial institute of social sciences, noted that regulations should be drafted to further monitor enterprises and staff so that personal information will not be sold.

Regardless of the new regulation, Ma Shuping said she doesn't believe her business will be affected seriously by the new measure.

"E-commerce has become a trend in China," she said. "People might feel a little bit uneasy at the beginning, but their online shopping habits won't change."

By the end of June 2015, China had 668 million Internet users, 48.8 percent of the population. Total e-commerce transaction volume in 2014 surged 59.4 percent to 16.39 trillion yuan, nearing its goal of 18 trillion yuan by 2015.

In fact, big clients are already required to provide their real personal identification for some logistics companies.

In Xining, capital city of west China's Qinghai province, a courier surnamed Zhang told Xinhua that clients who are only required to settle their accounts once a month are asked to submit a copy of their ID cards.

"The copies are kept by our company, but we cannot see them," Zhang said. "In fact, the new measure is good both for us and our customers, although it makes our work more complicated. But who wants to see unwanted accidents?"