A database of hundreds of millions of chat logs of Chinese social media users has been leaked online, revealing that private records like user photos and identity card numbers were gathered by a government-linked surveillance programme, a researcher has found.
Victor Gevers, a cybersecurity researcher with the non-profit GDI Foundation, shared his findings on Twitter on Monday. The surveillance network, he said, tracks about 364 million online profiles on a daily basis and retrieves sensitive information including their private chats, file transfers, real names, and ID numbers. The data is then distributed to police stations across the country.