Privacy
10:40, 21-Dec-2017
Chinese live-streaming platform brought down by privacy concerns
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A live-streaming platform in China has closed amid growing privacy concerns.
The owner of the platform, Qihoo 360, announced on its official Weibo microblog on Wednesday that Shuidi (Water Drop) had been shut down.
The platform had mainly broadcast footage from the company's smart camera, which a lot of companies use for surveillance.
It came under heavy fire online after blogger Chen Feifei posted a long article saying streaming surveillance footage is illegal in China and a blunt invasion of privacy.
Qihoo 360's smart camera family /Screenshot from Qihoo 360
Qihoo 360's smart camera family /Screenshot from Qihoo 360
Many provinces in the country have strict regulations on surveillance cameras. For example, footage obtained cannot be used for entertainment purposes.
In defense of its product, Qihoo 360 said the streaming feature's default position is off. Therefore, users have to manually turn it on in order to show the footage to the public.
But a local newspaper in Beijing cited cases where users accidentally turned on the feature and streamed private areas online.
Qihoo said its team and technology had not been able to tell which footage is private, so they decided to cut out the whole feature.
The only thing left on the Shuidi website is an announcement of termination. /Screenshot from Qihoo 360
The only thing left on the Shuidi website is an announcement of termination. /Screenshot from Qihoo 360
"But there are still a lot of users who intentionally bought the cam for streaming. What about us?" a customer complained on tech blog cnBeta.
In an article on Shuidi's website, the product team said they never imaged it could be so hard to run a live-streaming platform.
"We only added the feature because of customers' demand to stream their puppies online. We didn't think of the consequences," said the article.