The Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s Taobao shopping platform suffered a data leak that exposed over 1.1 billion pieces of user information according to a Chinese court verdict. Taobao is Alibaba’s popular shopping platform in China, with more than 710 million customers every month in 2020.
The implicated marketing consultant illegally obtained user data through web scraping software from November 2019 to July 2020 before Alibaba discovered the illegal operation and alerted the police.
The People’s Court of Suiyang District in Central Henan Province imprisoned the Chinese software developer and his employer for three years in prison and a $70,260 fine (450,000 Yuan).
