(Yicai Global) July 3 -- Telecoms giants Huawei Technologies and ZTE, artificial intelligence unicorn Yitu Technology and seven other Chinese tech firms have received an international standard certification for their handling of users' personal data from the UK’s national standards body.

The companies have been awarded the ISO/IEC 27701:2019 certification, an extension of the previous ISO/IEC 27001 code, which has extra requirements in order to establish, implement, maintain and improve a Privacy Information Management System, the British Standards Institution said yesterday.

The new normal caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is bringing digitization and industrial transformation to the forefront of businesses, said Martin Zhang, managing director of BSI China. Data security risks need to be addressed for the healthy development of AI.

The protection of user privacy is a top priority, Shanghai-based Yitu said yesterday. The firm has been offering AI-empowered solutions to hospitals and organizations globally in the fight against Covid-19.

The certification was also awarded to 12 companies last November, including Korea’s Lotte Duty Free, the US-based Blackhawk Network and Singapore’s Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce.

Editor: Kim Taylor