Sangfor Technologies has built a special system that can analyze employees’ resignation intentions by monitoring and reviewing their online activities, according to the South China Morning Post.
The system implemented by Sangfor Technologies gained public attention after a user on the networking app Maimai.cn said he had been fired after the company used the surveillance system and found out he applied for another job.
“My boss says he knows exactly what I’m doing during working hours,” the person wrote on Maimai.cn, attaching a screenshot showing the “resignation analysis system”.
According to patent registration information on data analytics firm Qichacha, Sangfor applied for a patent in 2018 for a system that analyzes employees’ resignation intentions by reading the information they submit to websites. recruitment web, social media platform, and email system. The system can track employees’ online activity in the office, to check which job sites the employee has viewed, submit applications, and then rank employees by risk level. to resign.
Sangfor was founded in 2000, has about 100,000 customers. The company has many government clients, including the State Tax Administration, the State Asset Management and Supervision Commission of the State Council of China, and the Shanxi Provincial Audit Office. It is not clear how many agencies or companies are using Sangfor’s resignation risk analysis system.
analytics system Sangfor has sparked a heated debate on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and Zhihu. Many users claim that this type of software program violates personal privacy. “It is difficult to say whether the system is tracking work behavior or personal behavior, as it tracks all online behavior through the company network and computers,” one user commented on the platform. China’s most popular Q&A Zhihu.
No Chinese authorities were immediately available for comment. China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) took effect in November 2021. It is one of the world’s toughest data privacy regulations, placing legal restrictions on how personal data can be collected, used, and managed. PIPL, along with the Data Privacy law, is seen as the end of the free era of China’s tech industry.