Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, has suffered reputational damage for its customer data management due to growing privacy concerns in the country. Alibaba's subsidiary Ant Financial had to apologize after users said they felt duped into allowing the Alipay service to share their data and spending habits with Ant and third-party services. Ant Financial, owned by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, provides mobile phone payments, consumer credit services to millions of customers. Many internet users reacted with disdain to learn that Alipay, the electronic payment method used by millions of Chinese every day to transact on Alibaba's Taobao platform and elsewhere, more or less surreptitiously made them consent to share data . "It's as if Taobao made a profit by selling our information, and there is no way to refuse!" protested one user on the Weibo microblogging system. The sale of personal information is common in China, despite the introduction last year of a controversial cybersecurity law which, however, requires internet services to have users' consent before sharing their data.
