“One programmer wrote a crawler, and 200 people in the whole company got caught.” ‘It can’t be!

When I first heard this news from a friend, I was a little skeptical. As a programmer, who hasn’t written a few crawlers? It’s a bit of an exaggeration to write a crawler.

The friend said the information is confirmed and has entered the trial phase.

01. Further confirm the message

My friend knew several lawyer friends and had some business dealings with them. I learned that they wanted to try to expand their business to the group of programmers. At that time, I just left my job and had time. Under the arrangement of my friends, we had a chat to see if there was any opportunity for cooperation.

Why do they want to expand into programmers? In fact, because they represented this programmer’s lawsuit, they found that many programmers are completely ignorant of the law, and it is not too much to say that they are blind to the law.

I also happened to be curious about the case of programmer being caught by crawler to see what was going on, so I sat down with two lawyers and my friends and had an in-depth conversation before I knew the whole story.

The programmer, who was arrested by police, denied breaking the law during questioning and was completely unaware that he had broken the law. After entering, I always thought that the police had made a mistake and would release myself in a few days. As a result, I also missed the chance to get bail.

The lawyer said that the programmer’s mother at that time when he graduated, because the programmer industry is too hard to agree with him to be a programmer, but he has been very interested in this industry, insisted on doing a code farmer, did not expect this thing two years later.

Their families all regret it. It has been half a year since the incident, and the person concerned is still in prison. No matter how it ends, it will be a big blow to the programmer and his family.

The following content is based on partial speculation and online information, may be slightly biased.

02. A reptilian case

A well-known Internet company, suddenly found that the company’s server for several days of pressure multiplication, resulting in the company’s internal system collapse can not access, the company’s leadership ordered the technology department to solve as soon as possible.

The company’s system usually visits have been relatively stable, but I do not know why these days the system pressure suddenly increased, after a few days of investigation by technical personnel found a surprising truth, the company’s customer information was captured, and a large number of interface visits.

With the further investigation of the technical personnel, the phenomenon was more shocked. The intruder had stolen a large amount of customer information by using this portal, and all the clues led to a big data company.

The company’s main business is to sell resume databases. After checking the company to sell resume data, including their own home customers resume information.

After the technology department reported to the leadership, the company decided to report the case after a meeting.

03. Crime scene

A period of time before the incident, Xiaoming (alias) received the demand of the leadership of the technology department, the requirement to write a section of crawler batch capture data from an interface on the Internet, crawler developed after the test no problem, Xiaoming will upload the program to the company server.

After the program has been running for a period of time, maybe there are new requirements, or maybe Xiao Ming wants to further optimize the crawler program by adjusting the number of threads of the crawler from the original relatively small value to a relatively large value.

After the improved program was uploaded to the server, Xiao Ming tracked the progress of the crawler, which ran smoothly and was much faster. After submitting it, Xiao Ming forgot about it as usual.

Xiao Ming did not expect that the crawler he submitted this time could actually put the other party’s service to hang, and did not expect that he was imprisoned for writing a code.

The whole company gets caught

One workday in 2019, the company’s employees were busy as usual. A programmer and a product manager were arguing over a requirement, and Ming was sitting in the office typing code with headphones on.

All of a sudden, a large group of police came and asked everyone to leave their stations and keep their hands off their computers, phones and other devices. The whole company was confused and didn’t know what was going on, but they did as they were told.

The police quickly sealed up all the office supplies of the company, asked the relevant personnel of the technology department to the server information, the company all up and down more than 200 people are sent to the detention center to understand the situation.

On the way to the detention center, we all wondered if there was a mistake. We were just a technology company and we didn’t cheat.

Xiao Ming has always thought that he did not commit a crime, he is just a technician, all the work is also in accordance with the leadership requirements to carry out, should soon be released us.

Subsequently, non-core staff of the company were released, mainly in HR and administrative staff. It was confirmed that 36 people from the company were arrested, most of them programmers.

The law firm entrusted by Ming after his arrest is the same as that of the two lawyers we communicated with. It is said that Ming has not believed he is guilty since his imprisonment and has missed the chance to get bail because he has refused to admit guilt.

Xiaoming is still awaiting the final judgment…

05. Background of the company involved

Qiaoda technology is claimed to be the largest user portrait key data service provider in China, focusing on the research and development of forward-looking products in the field of big data and artificial intelligence, with customers covering the Internet industry and pan-financial field.

Most of its executives are from Baidu, which netted 186 million yuan in 2017.

Founded in July 2014, the company is valued at $200 million in the B round and has reached the C round of financing. Investors include Kai-fu Lee Innovation Works, Qi Yujie of Baidu Venture Capital, CITIC Industry Fund, artificial Intelligence Industry Fund and so on.

Qiaoda’s founder, Cheng Yu, was baidu’s first head of product department, and co-founder, Shen Yi, was Baidu’s technical director of e-commerce division and Baidu’s Vice President of Technology.

The company claimed to have mapped out multidimensional data involving 800 million people in China by integrating up to 220 million resumes of natural persons, 10 billion user ID combinations and 100 billion + user aggregate data. Including personal and non-private information.

In addition, Qiaoda technology has more than 1 billion contacts, and holds relevant social relations, organizational relations, family relations data. Combined with resumes, address books, and more than 100 billion other user data obtained externally, Qiaoda claims to have cognitive data of more than 800 million natural persons.

In other words, more than 57 percent of the Chinese population’s information is in qiaoda’s database.

“Pretty much every major Internet company you can name is a qiaoda client.” A former resume broker.

06. A number of big data companies have been investigated recently

Recent big data industry, jittery.

On the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival, tianyi Zhengxin, a subsidiary controlled by China Telecom, got word that its general manager, deputy general managers and marketing staff had been detained by police because of a police investigation into a big data company it worked with.

Before Tianyi, New Yan Technology CEO Huang Qianqian was taken away by the police, Mo Scorpion Technology COMPANY CEO Zhou Jiangxiang involved in the investigation, Gongxinbao company was posted at the door of the seal, well-known third-party data service company Juxinli announced that it would suspend the external provision of user authorized operator crawler services…

In addition, Tongdun Technology, the leading risk control platform for big data in China, was also revealed that the crawler department has been disbanded, and its CEO Jiang Tao has gone abroad to take shelter. In response, Tongdun technology issued a statement yesterday to refute the rumors, saying that its subsidiary hangzhou Xinchuan Technology Co., Ltd. did stop the crawler business, but other comments are not true.

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According to insider sources, 15 companies, several of them valued at more than a few billion dollars, have been put on the list of companies to be investigated in a recent regulatory clean-up of the data mess.

Many domestic big data company data sources more or less have certain problems, with China from June 1 this year, “the People’s Republic of China network security Law” will be implemented, all online behavior will be more and more strict, if also in accordance with the previous inertia to operate, sooner or later there will be a problem.

07. Programmers use technology sparingly

I do not know whether you find that, with the continuous development of the national economy, the industry may be in the gray stage before, now almost all slowly can not do. The purpose of writing this article is also to warn everyone that technology is not guilty, but the cost of using it in the wrong place is also very huge.

I have read such a report before, a programmer because of hobby wrote a small program, and uploaded this program to the Internet, did not expect that after two years, someone took advantage of this small program illegal profit of more than 5 million.

Although the programmer did not profit from the program, he indirectly provided tools for criminals, and was finally sentenced to two years in prison with two years of probation.

A programmer’s life is simple, and his work is probably all about code and bugs. Xiao Ming has never connected his profession with crime.

Technology itself is not illegal, just like a fruit knife. If it is used to cut apples and pears, there is no problem, but if it is used to hurt people, it is a weapon and should be included in the list of material evidence.

In most cases, crawlers collect public information on the Internet, which is hardly illegal. But when it comes to hacking into someone else’s system to get data, there are legal risks.

May be many students are ignorant, many Internet companies live by scraping data. He just carried out the work assigned by the company normally, how could he be suspected of committing a crime?

Here the combination of lawyer friends to give some advice, here excerpted for reference only.

The relationship between unit crime and individual crime

Let’s start with unit crime. In addition to crimes committed by natural persons, there are also crimes committed by units, which refer to acts endangering society for which companies, enterprises, institutions, organs and organizations seek benefits for their units and are decided by the decision-making organs or persons in charge of the units and for which criminal liability shall be borne by law.

In principle, China’s criminal law adopts double punishment system for unit crimes, that is, if a unit commits a crime, it shall be fined to the unit, and its directly responsible persons in charge and other directly responsible persons shall be punished. Relevant judicial interpretations stipulate that in the trial of intentional crimes committed by the unit, the directly responsible persons in charge and other directly responsible persons shall be punished according to their role in the unit crime without distinguishing between the principal and accomplice.

Thus, corporate crimes are likely to implicate employees, especially the reptile engineers who were directly responsible for illegally obtaining data in the case. That’s why they were arrested even though they said nothing at the company.

Secondly, whether can “do not know is not guilty” to excuse? One of the principles of criminal law is that there is no crime without explicit provisions of the law, and there is no “no crime without knowledge”. Subjective malice is one of the factors to measure the crime. Hacking other people’s servers and obtaining information that is not public cannot be said to be malicious and cannot be explained away by ignorance of the law.

09. Key points: What kind of reptile is illegal?

If the crawler collects the citizen’s name, id number, communication contact information, address, account password, property status, track and other personal information and uses it in illegal ways, it will definitely constitute illegal behavior of obtaining citizen’s personal information illegally.

In addition, in accordance with the relevant provisions, in violation of the relevant provisions of the state, sell or provide citizens’ personal information to others, if the circumstances are serious, stealing, or by any other means of illegal access to citizen’s personal information, all can form into “the crime of infringement of citizens’ personal information”, shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years or criminal detention, and concurrently or independently be sentenced to a fine; If the circumstances are especially serious, he shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not less than three years but not more than seven years and shall also be fined.

Attention: under the following circumstances, reptiles may be illegal, serious or even criminal.

  • 1. The crawler evade the anti-crawler measures set up by the website operator or crack the anti-crawler measures of the server and illegally obtain relevant information. If the circumstances are serious, it may constitute the crime of “illegally obtaining data of the computer information system”.

  • 2. If the crawler interferes with the normal operation of the visited website or system and the consequences are serious, it shall violate the criminal law and constitute the crime of “destroying the computer information system”.

  • 3. If the information collected by crawlers belongs to citizens’ personal information, it may constitute an illegal act of illegally obtaining citizens’ personal information; if the circumstances are serious, it may constitute “crime of infringing citizens’ personal information”.

10. The last

Finally, I remind you to respect the law and love life.

Wish every programmer can use their own technology to change the world, let our society become more beautiful!

Reference:

Burning finance and economics: using crawlers to obtain resumes 36 people were arrested

Darkest hour: The whole industry will be caught!

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