Personal Data Protection In The EU And China – A Comparative Analysis

I am old enough to remember the dawn of the Internet. I was at law school at the time and the Internet - or "the Web" as it was then called - was starting to escape the University campuses and take hold in the commercial world. In 1993, when I first logged on to the Web to join a chat group devoted to my favorite rock band, it was seen as a digital village where people from all around the world could reach across geographical, political and religious divides and share information, opinions and ideas. It was a utopian ideal and for a time, it really did feel like a community.

Fast forward to the present day and things are very different. The internet has been turned into a commercial tool where personal data can be harvested and used to sell products and services to users. That in turn has made data a valuable commodity - something that can be bought and sold and, increasingly, stolen or corrupted.

Recently, however, things have begun to change. After numerous scandals and public backlash against big internet companies, governments across the world are seeking to address the imbalance between citizens and the organizations that collect, process and use their personal data. In the EU, that has taken the form of the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") which came into force on 25 May 2018. In China, it has taken the form of the Cybersecurity Law ("CSL") which came into force on 1 June 2017 and related administrative measures, including the "Information Security Technology Personal Information Security Specification" (the "Personal Information Specification")1 which came into force on 1 May 2018 and the "Administrative Measures on the Security Assessment of the Overseas Transfer of Personal Information and Important Data" (the "Data Transfer Law") which is still in draft but likely to come into effect some time in 2019. For ease of reference, I will refer to the Chinese laws and regulations collectively as the "PRC Laws".

In broad terms, the aim...

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