A company owned by Chinese police in Beijing collects detailed personal information as part of the Canadian visa-application process, raising security concerns for travelers applying for a visa to Canada and other countries.
Chinese security services “obviously have a huge interest in mining visa data,” Robert Potter, a cybersecurity consultant in Australia who has worked as an adviser to the Canadian government, told The Globe.
He said visa-application centres are of high intelligence value. Government agents have a better chance of infiltrating a foreign state if they can learn from these centres about how to get their visas approved.
The knowledge could also be used to bar Chinese citizens from leaving the country. Potters said some people, such as Uyghur Muslims, a large ethnic minority group that the CCP is bent on controlling, can “get flagged as a terrorist” just for applying for a visa to leave China.
“If you’re an Uyghur and you’re applying for a visa to Canada on humanitarian grounds, giving that information to the security service is really dangerous.”
Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador to China, said it’s best to assume there is no privacy for visa applications made in China.
“You can bet the Chinese government is interested in knowing who is going to study where abroad, who is going as a tourist, and who wants to leave and immigrate,” he said.
