Privacy and Power Around the Beijing 2022 Olympics: Legal and Political Perspectives – International Journal of Law, Ethics, and Technology

-                                        Title
+                                        Privacy and Power Around the Beijing 2022 Olympics: Legal and Political Perspectives
-                                        Author
+                                        Qianye Zhang
-                                        Affiliation
+                                        World Bank
-                                        Region/Country
+                                        United States
-                                        Pages
+-71
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-                                        Permalink
-                                        DOI
-                                        Keywords
+                                        SARS-CoV-2; MY2022; Privacy; Cybersecurity; Censorship
-                                        Abstract
+                                        The Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games launched a smartphone application, MY2022, to monitor the health status of participants in order to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, Citizen Lab, a Canadian research institute, found that the protections of the data storage and transmission process of this application were either weak or completely unencrypted, leading to users' privacy being at risk of potential leaks. In addition, the study found that the app's instant messaging feature contained a list of sensitive words that had not been activated. Although Citizen Lab's report pointed out that these security vulnerabilities might be unintentional failures by developers rather than an intentional arrangement by the Chinese government, the criticisms were still widely cited by international media, bringing pressure on the Chinese Olympic Committee and the Chinese authorities. Despite the fact that both the International Olympic Committee and the Chinese Olympic Committee declared the
bugs had been fixed since the release of the initial research report, Beijing has much to learn beyond the scope of technical issues.