The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong's privacy watchdog, said on Aug. 28 that they had accepted 768 cases of illegal disclosure of personal information, of which 683 were reported by civilians. 72 percent of the victims are police officers.

Personal information of some police officers’ families was also disclosed online, according to the privacy watchdog, saying that some rioters even named children and noted they were “ready to pick the children up from school with sacks.”

Some people collected personal information of wives, girlfriends and children, including ID and phone numbers, posting pictures online with threatening words. Responding to these cases, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data stressed that either posting or forwarding this information counted as an unlawful act.

Denouncing this development as an “unprecedented situation,” the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data said that police have started to arrest suspects in connection with the illegal online disclosure of personal information and bullying behavior, prioritizing cases involving children and teenagers.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data has sent 38 letters to eight online social media and discussion platforms involved since June, demanding that these platforms contact relevant users and ask them to stop uploading such posts.

The privacy watchdog has also established a team to search for similar content. By noon on Aug. 28, the team had demanded that relevant platforms delete more than 870 web links, with over half of them being deleted upon request.

Some web links were on social media platforms operated overseas, and many of the posts illegally exposing personal information were published by people outside of China, according to on.cc, the official website of Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily News.