BACKGROUND:
The Wall Street Journal reports that Alibaba’s Taobao shopping website was hit by a web crawler that collected users’ ID and mobile phone data for eight months, according to a Chinese court filing, and more than 1.1 billion pieces of user data were captured. Clement Chen, an assistant professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, noted that Chinese consumers predominantly use their mobile phones to sign up for most Internet services, thus cell phone data helps a bad actor identify their social media accounts and other PII. Taobao.com is ranked by web traffic statistics and analytics site Hypestat as the 8th most popular website worldwide, with 10 billion+ monthly visits.
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