The ambitions of the company, Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co. Ltd. extend far beyond its small real-estate footprint. It is building tools to process the world’s open-source information about influential people — culled from Twitter, criminal records, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos and more — into information that can be analyzed and used by universities, companies, government actors and the Chinese military. “Our client base is a bit special,” the woman said. It also claims to have built tools to manipulate content on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms. Facebook now says it has banned the company from its platform.
But The Globe and a consortium of international journalists have accessed an early copy of the company’s Overseas Key Information Database, which shows the type of information Zhenhua is collecting for use in China, including records of small-town mayors in western Canada, where Chinese diplomats have sought to curry favour. The company, led by a former IBM data centre management expert, has also described its work online in job postings, LinkedIn records, blog articles and software patents. One employee described work “mining the business needs of military customers for overseas data.” Zhenhua’s website listed a series of partners that include important military contractors. In total, it claims to have collected information on more than 2.4 million people, 650,000 organizations from over two billion articles of social media.
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