Source: Xinhua.
Just past one shopping festival and another arrives. While shoppers happily buy, protecting the personal information on express waybills has become one of their biggest concerns.
When you suddenly get cold calls and texts from strange property agents or merchants, you may not realise the leak began with a small express waybill. A waybill carries your name, phone, address and the type of goods. From this personal information, one can even find a consumer’s social accounts and infer shopping habits and financial capacity. With the Personal Information Protection Law now in force, waybill information security is under scrutiny again.
Privacy waybills are secure and green
Waybill security is not a new problem. From 2017, express companies launched privacy waybills, encrypting personal information and masking parts of the name, address and phone number. Couriers scan the parcel with an app and reach recipients through a virtual number, which expires once the parcel is signed for.
Privacy waybills effectively protect consumers’ personal information, and because less is printed, or an electronic waybill leaves only a barcode on the package, they cut paper use and are greener. Cainiao’s figures show its electronic waybill, launched in 2014, has served more than 100 billion parcels, saving the industry 400 billion sheets of paper and 20 billion yuan in costs, equivalent to cutting carbon emissions by 1 billion kilograms.
JD.com’s paperless warehouse operations and electronic waybills cut paper consumption by 13,000 tonnes in 2020 alone.
Low efficiency hampers adoption
Yet adoption has been rocky. Apart from a few firms such as SF Express that still use privacy waybills by default, many platforms have taken them offline, or moved them into value-added services rather than the default option; consumers must manually choose “secure number” or “address-hidden sending” to hide their information on the label.
Why is usage falling rather than rising? “The key is lower delivery efficiency,” one courier said. With a traditional label, everything is visible at a glance and parcels for each building and floor can be sorted and delivered in one pass. With a privacy waybill, information is incomplete and every parcel must be scanned, cutting efficiency by at least 10 percent. “If I scan a parcel only to find it belongs to the floor I already finished, I have to go back, which wastes a lot of time. During peak seasons when volumes are huge and mix-ups are already common, incomplete labels waste even more time and energy,” the courier said.
Cainiao service expert Li Hongyu has noted that privacy waybills depend on electronic waybills and cloud printing technology, so merchants must first install a cloud-printing component to use the service.
And when parcels cannot reach the door, privacy waybills can hurt the user experience. When consumers are out, or security rules keep couriers out of a compound, parcels are left with the doorman, mailroom or on a shelf, and finding your own parcel among a pile with blurred information is not easy.
Raise the cost of violations
China has been improving laws on personal information protection and strengthening enforcement. The Personal Information Protection Law, in force since 1 November, provides that no organisation or individual may illegally collect, use, process or transmit others’ personal information, or illegally buy, sell, provide or publish it.
Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said the information on a waybill is personal privacy, and the law makes clear that information processors must encrypt, de-identify and otherwise protect personal information including names and phone numbers, the most basic technical safeguard.
“Responsibility for personal information protection is fairly clear: the express companies themselves bear it,” Pan said. Companies can decompose the responsibility by region among their outlets, or set up dedicated departments for information supervision with matching disciplinary measures. Couriers who leak information should face legal liability and industry blacklists, with lifetime bans from the sector for serious cases, raising the cost of violations.
“The industry should take the implementation of the Personal Information Protection Law as an opportunity to improve its personal information protection system,” said Liu Junhai, a law professor at Renmin University of China.
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