Taobao app Photo: VCG

Online marketplace Taobao said it has discovered and addressed an unauthorized data scraping incident. No user information was sold to a third party and no economic loss occurred, the company said on Wednesday.

"Taobao devotes substantial resources to combating unauthorized scraping on our platform, as data privacy and security is of the utmost importance. We have proactively discovered and addressed this unauthorized data scraping incident. No user information was sold to a third party and no economic loss occurred. We will continue to work with law enforcement to defend and protect the interests of our users and partners," a spokesperson for Taobao told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Taobao reported to the police on August 14, 2020 that an unknown person had bypassed the platform's risk control and copied a large amount of encrypted data, thepaper.com reported on Tuesday.

According to a written judgement published on China Judgements Online on June 3, the defendant, surnamed Lu, in Central China's Henan province, obtained 1.18 billion items of data including digital IDs and mobile phone numbers of Taobao customers using software Lu had developed. 

Another defendant surnamed Li got 340,188 yuan ($53,160) in commission from 19.7 million items of information provided by Lu, the judgement said.

Both defendants were sentenced to more than three years in prison in the first instance for the crime of infringing on citizens' personal information, and they were also fined.

Last Thursday, China approved and issued the full text of the Data Security Law, providing a legal basis for data processing activities and security supervision. The law will come into force on September 1, 2021.

Recently, many Internet apps have been adjusting their users' privacy and data policies.

Global Times