介绍:
LVdW: Chinese social media app WeChat has launched a Child Safety Emergency Response System. It is initiated by Tencent’s WeChat and Zhongshe Social Work Department Foundation. It is said that people can report the loss of their children in the system and the information will be instantly sent out on WeChat to the public account. Wu You, what exactly is happening here? What are people thinking, what are they saying about this particular thing?
WY: So this is initiated by WeChat. The company has initiated a new public account. If you report loss of your children that, it will send out messages to all the other WeChat users have logged on this public account. And also take the missing spot as the center of the circle, and the loss information will be spread out in concentric circles, and within the speed as follows: within the first thirty minutes, one mile per minute, and then for the following hour two miles per minute, within the golden saving period of time, within about three hours it will send out all the information to the person who are living within that circle. Nowadays in China, WeChat now has about 600 million active users, so it has a large amount of users which can actually help to do some public activities.
LVdW: So, you’d have to register for the app and if a child goes missing someone would report it immediately and then you would find out if you were, you know a member of the app itself.
WY: And also if someone near that – the loss spot – and can directly report some information if they saw anyone suspicious. And also the system can report child missing to the local police with a simple one click on their cellphone. Simply you need to log on to this public account. That is what goes to some kind of debate area, someone argues that you need to put all your personal information into this public account, just like your real name, your identification card number and your cell phone and other kind of detailed information. And then people argue online that are having the privacy concern: what if all these information has been misused?
BK: If you were in that situation, you wanna do whatever you can, and, if it’s, you know, a little bit of your privacy it would probably seem worth it. If it’s done well, and there’s a lot of users there, that might be a worthy trade-off. But again, though, you would hope that information collected is only what is really needed by this app or whatever, and that it’s controlled and managed carefully, because obviously we live in a time where there’s all kinds of cyber-attacks and your information is not often as safe as you think it is.
WY: Well Brian, you are from the United States. The US has a similar child safety emergency response system right, the Amber…?
BK: Right, the Amber Alert, which are named after a young girl who was kidnapped or at least taken away in somehow – Amber. It – the way it works is they can also send out an alert system like this. Some phones actually have it automatically enabled, so you don’t sign-up, just if you’ve bought a phone that’s like this, if the local police department or whatever sends out the message, you just get a text message there. So it avoids the issue of privacy and giving away your information, but I’ve heard some people have found issues of it not being really that necessary or useful and kind of just unwanted messaging in some ways, because if you’re there, in that area, yeah, that might be a good thing, but if you’re really far away or especially if you’re out of town at that moment it’s not really that useful, and could be kind of annoying.
LVdW: Well, now we’re not talking in this particular one, the Chinese version of this one, it’s not the police that’s making those Amber alerts, it’s users as well. So, you know, now are you going to see a lot of false kind – not false reporting but maybe a little premature saying, Oh, this child’s been missing, meanwhile two hours later shows up perfectly fine. And you know what, if that happens, that’s fine too, because if that’s the case, surely that’s, again, a very small price to pay, a small inconvenience of getting a text message versus, you know, potentially losing their child.
