Currently, the State Council Informatization Office is preparing a draft for a national Personal Data Protection Law for China. In order to support the State Council Informatization Office (SCITO) both in the law-drafting process as well as in the preparation for implementing it, the project designed and implemented this workshop on ‘Data Protection Issue Identification’.
The objective of the workshop was to discuss the Key topics which are of crucial relevance for the development of a Chinese Personal Data Protection Regime. These key topics defined through the workshop will be the anchor points for the overview over relevant EU good practice examples. There were approximately 15 people in attendance, including Graham Sutton, senior DP expert from UCL, U.K., Mr. Ou Yangwu division director from policy and regulation department SCITO and Mr. Ma Senshu division director from department of industry, communications and commerce SC-LAO, as well as a number of professors from leading universities and academic institutions in Beijing.
Key topics were discussed during the workshop including:
· whether, and to what extent, the desired result could be achieved by means other than legislation;
· the absence in China of a tradition of protecting privacy;
· the difficulty of achieving a consensus among all the interested parties on the scope and content of a new law;
· whether the proposed law should be limited to the protection of personal data (or personal information) or cover privacy more broadly;
· the need to take account of rapid developments in technology;
· the need to balance the protection of personal data with the need for organisations to use personal data;
· whether the EU model (centralised and prescriptive) or the US model (sectoral and more self-regulatory) should be followed;
· the difficulties for China in having an independent supervisory body whose responsibilities included the supervision of government;
· how to define and deal with sensitive personal data;
· what to do about the sharing of personal data;
· the importance to trade of international transfers of personal data. |
