Alipay apologizes for data theft

Alipay, the online payment arm of Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba, apologized to its users for concerns over stolen data.

The company said on its Weibo account on Saturday that the data was stolen by a former staff surnamed Li, who downloaded more than 20GB of user data in 2010, and then sold the information to e-commerce and data companies with two other accomplices.

However, Alipay denied that the data theft threatened its users' privacy.