The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong announced on August 28 that thus far the Office has received complaints or discovered a total of 768 cases of exposure of personal information. The victims included government officials, police officers and protesters. Even some thugs threatened that “they had prepared a sack to pick (the kids of police officers) from the school” in posts exposing the information of their kids. The Office strongly condemned such threats and called them unprecedented, and said that the police had begun to launch arrests on the online exposure and bullying acts and would handle the cases involving children and teenagers in priority.

It was reported by on.cc on August 29 that the privacy commissioner Huang Ji'er revealed on August 28 that among the 768 cases, 683 cases were complaints received by the Office, where 72% of the victims were police officers. And the personal data of their wife or girl-friend was exposed in detail.

The website also claimed that since the platforms involved in some links are operated overseas, a lot of personal data that have been exposed were released by people staying abroad. Huang Ji'er said that they had got in touch with relevant departments, yet received a response saying that there was not such a large-scale exposure. Therefore, “there was nothing to be shared” and he could only ask the Internet users not to commit any violation of the laws.

Lin Zhiwei, chairman of The Junior Police Officers' Association of The Hong Kong Police Force (JPOA), said that quite some front-line police officers reflected that they worried that their families would be harassed. The Association urged the management to follow up the cases one by one and required the management to provide support such as psychological service to the affected police officers and their families if they had any need.

The spokesperson of Hong Kong Police said, recently some Internet users threatened to bully the children of police officers with different methods in the new academic year on socializing media and discussion areas. The management of the police is closely discussing with the Education Bureau on cooperation mechanism. Internal notice will be sent to alert police officers to notify their immediate commander if their children were bullied or treated unfairly.

Executive Editor: Ke Ye

Translation: Ke Ye, Wenjin Chen