Research on Personal Information Protection of Chinese ‘Civil Code’ and ‘Personal Information Protection Law’

The importance of personal information protection is widely recognized and drive governments to make possible responses in the worlds. To protect personal information, the People’s Republic of China revised ‘Civil Code’ and enacted ‘Personal Information Protection Law’ respectively. The ‘Civil Code’ provides provisions to protect both of privacy and personal information. The law aims to provide ex post remedies against infringement of right to privacy and property right of personal information. However, privacy and personal information are not clearly distinguishable concept. There are some court cases where the two concepts are overlapping. Regarding this issue, the authors insist to differentiate between the protection of privacy right and personal information. ‘The Personal Information Protection Law’ aims to protect sensitive personal information as well as personal information. The law provides ex-ante protection against abuse of (sensitive) personal information. At the same time, the law stipulates ex-post remedies against the infringement of (sensitive) personal information. However, big data is highly utilized not only in private areas but also in public areas. For example, for the identification of criminals being chased by police or of soldiers who are missing on the battlefields, sensitive personal information, which are accumulated in big data, can be used for public interest. In this paper, the authors suggest that it can be an solution to differentiate regulation on public use of sensitive personal information with private use of it.