According to the Guangzhou Internet Court, the Guangzhou Internet Court recently announced a case of buying and selling citizens’ personal information.AIWillGenerate videos from face photos, forging facial recognition authentication, and thus making illegal profits. This involves two so-called "businesses", one is called "head check" and the other is called "face pass".
Among them, "head checking" refers to obtaining personal sensitive information of the person to be searched based on the information provided by the buyer, while "face verification" is to generate dynamic video with facial information, which is used in the face verification link of cracking the account.
Starting from September 2020, Zheng used an instant messaging software to form a group, and posted advertisements to the general public in the group and WeChat groups and QQ groups, claiming that he could provide a so-called "head-checking" service, which is to search for personal information such as high-definition ID card photos by ID card number.
According to Zheng's confession, he purchased personal photos corresponding to certain ID numbers from unspecified suppliers through social platforms at a price of about 15 to 20 yuan per photo. Ren, Dai, and Chen successively purchased citizens' personal information from Zheng through the group set up by Zheng at a price ranging from 50 to 100 yuan per photo, and used artificial intelligence software to create fake dynamic facial recognition videos that can perform nodding, blinking and other actions, which were used to unblock accounts and verify the real-name authentication of some apps, making illegal profits.
After trial, the court held that the four defendants illegally obtained citizens' personal information, forged face recognition videos, and cracked the face verification system, violating the real-name network security management system. In the process of committing the infringement, the four people involved used the self-destructing function of a certain software to delete a large amount of information and transaction records. At present, the number of victims, their identities, whereabouts of information, and use cannot be verified. Although the victims in this case cannot be identified, the leaked personal information is still circulating in the online black and gray market, and the personality rights, property rights, and security rights of the general public are at risk of being violated.
In the judgment of the civil public interest litigation in this case, in addition to being sentenced to cancel the Internet accounts used for infringement, disband or withdraw from the communication groups used to teach criminal methods, pay a total of more than 100,000 yuan in public interest damages, and make a public apology, the four defendants were also ordered to make behavioral compensation through warning education, public welfare publicity, volunteer services and other means related to personal information protection, and the public interest damages shall be offset depending on the effectiveness of the repair of the behavior.