Companies such as Apple, dealing with applications in China shops, will be forced to track the identities of users and developers with the real name registration in the event that they violate the country’s strict censorship laws.
The administration of cyberspace in China (CAC), said in a statement that providers of mobile apps would have to fulfill six requirements to help suppress “unscrupulous” use of its platforms for fraud control, distributing pornography and spread spam.
“A small number of applications have been investigated by criminal organizations for extending violence and terrorism, pornography, spam and other illegal information,” said the regulator.
Under the new regulations, application providers must keep a record of 60 days for users who download and install applications from the mobile app stores, as well as establish the identity of the users and the content of the applications if at some point the censorship laws are violated.
The legitimacy of the developers of applications that use these services for downloading must also be verified, according to new rules published on the website of the administration of the cyberspace of China on Tuesday.
This new regulation will put an additional burden on local developers in the form of delays in the publication for the App Store. Applications for the App Store of China are sent typically at least 20 days before the launch, but foreign developers are now seeing even more timeouts.
At the same time, new regulations require that all shops and application providers obtain the consent of a user prior to collecting personal information, location and contacts of these lists.
“The regulations apply to more than one dozen of platforms that offer applications to download, such as Apple and the local smart phone manufacturers”. Even the local search engines like Baidu are now obliged to mark content and verify the credentials of advertisers from August.
Apple still has not issued any statement about these new regulations.
