In September, Chinese telecommunication and computing technology company Huawei held its Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai and showed an invited group of journalists – including myself - around its factory in Shenzhen. During the visit, the company placed great emphasis on its commitment to being trusted by its customers and stakeholders and it approach to protecting and not monetising their personal data.
The visit put rotating chairman Guo Ping in front of the media for a question and answer session. While this provided a valuable insight into the company’s vision and view of its market, it also revealed (perhaps unwittingly) the limits of transparency within a guarded society like China. This was perhaps most evident in Ping’s deflection of my questions about data ethics and data science in favour of the corporate line.
"We attach great importance to the protection of data and privacy."
“At Huawei, we take cybersecurity and data protection as our highest priorities. We attach great importance to the protection of data and privacy, and we commit ourselves to compliance with those regulations in the countries where we operate, including GDPR in Europe,” he said. “The biggest difference between Huawei and internet service providers is that Huawei has never and Huawei will never monetise customer data.”
In recognition of some negative perceptions of the business, at one point Ping stressed: “If we did not do enough in the past, we are committed to further enhance our openness, collaboration and transparency so that different stakeholders - consumers, customers - have stronger confidence in Huawei as they select our products and services.”
Ping made very clear that the underlying business model for Huawei is to drive revenue and profits from its technologies and products. That does not encompass data monetisation, not least because of the distance he identified between the technology infrastructure Huawei sells and the companies that make use of those products.
"Huawei does not own telephone networks or the data that runs through them."
“To give you one example in the telecoms business, Huawei does not own telephone networks. Telephone networks are owned by telephony operators and we do not own data that runs through their networks. Data is owned by telephone service providers and their users,” he stressed.
That said, issues like cybersecurity do fall within the tech vendor’s ambit, not least through R&D investment into products to help keep hackers out of those data streams. “The second part of the investment is related to our technologies and operations so that, as we do operations for cloud services, the customer data involved would not get abused to ensure we will be compliant with the applicable laws and the regulations,” added Ping.
There is one area in which that distinction between the technology pipe and the data flowing through it getting squeezed - the new realm of artificial intelligence. Ping noted that there are three critical elements to AI: computing power, algorithms and data.
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