Whether Hangzhou is successful in its proposal and just how much privacy people in China will have post-pandemic are questions still very much up in the air.
On one hand, the new rights that will enable individuals to take action if data is leaked are set to be approved after deliberations by China’s annual meeting of parliament.
Search engine giant Baidu CEO Robin Li and other delegates to the meeting have also made a number of proposals, including that data collected during the epidemic should be destroyed after it ends or that rules should be put in place on how to manage the data.
But at the same time, it looks like health QR codes and their expanded use are here to stay as China presses ahead with national standards so that problems with data sharing and people travelling between cities and provinces can be avoided.
“In the future, the ‘health code’ has a wide range of application scenarios,” state news agency Xinhua said last week.
