Beijing:
In its most recent review of app security, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) criticized 44 other companies, including Agoda, Subway, Domino's Pizza and others, for violating the rights of users of their apps.
The ministry said in its most recent list of problematic apps released Friday that the China-based Agoda app "illegally collects user information" and the local Domino's Pizza app "forcibly, persistently and highly requested permissions."
In addition, the ministry claimed that apps from the Subway sandwich chain and Yoshinoya Japanese fast food chain require users to enable the targeted push feature.
According to the statement, MIIT has warned companies that failing to resolve the issues by September 5 will attract fines.
Together with China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC), MIIT is using its power to control the more rogue Internet industry than ever before. Since 2019, it has become common practice to criticize app developers for their data practices.
The new list, the fifth this year, is one of 25 lists of problematic apps published by MIIT over the past three years. Nearly 2,000 apps have been taken down by the regulator so far for inappropriate data collection, excessive permission requests, or defrauding users.
Most of the apps listed were previously allowed to continue working. A small number were permanently closed.
A new MIIT regulation went into effect last May and began to hold application providers accountable for collecting excessive amounts of user data unrelated to their core services and requiring users to provide inadvertent consent to the use of their data.
For the first time in 39 categories of mobile apps, including messaging, online shopping, payments, ride-hailing, short videos, live streaming and mobile games, the regulation defined what kind of personal information is required.
The CAC is also in charge of identifying apps that violate the laws governing data collection.
It has implemented a stringent new data protection regulation that essentially lowers the cybersecurity assessment of any company handling the data of more than 1 million users to a comparatively low threshold in a market with 1 billion Internet users.
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