China to publish privacy protection standards
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E-mail Xinhua, April 6, 2012
In December 2011, more than 6 million user accounts and passwords on CSDN, or China Software Developer Network, the country's largest programmers' website, were made public after hacker attacks.
The situation escalated within days, as several popular social networking and gaming websites also fell victim to a cyber attack, with the personal details of millions of subscribers being published.
In response to these leaks, the MIIT issued a notice on Dec. 28, asking Internet service providers to beef up protection of users' information through better internal management and new technologies.
The country has been considering the law on personal information protection since 2003 but has made slow progress because experts are divided on what information should be protected, Ouyang said.
Liu Tao, a researcher with the China Software Testing Center (CSTC), said the public is mostly concerned about their personal information in financial and telecom sectors.
He described the security of their records at present as like "money put in banks made of paper."
The new guidelines will clarify basic principles for personal information protection and provide detailed standards on collecting, processing, transferring and deleting this data, said Ouyang in an interview with the Beijing Times.
Information collectors should only obtain basic personal information that is enough to fulfill their purposes, and they must establish a protective system for it, according to the principle.
They should also delete the personal information they obtained once it has fulfilled its intended use informed to the information providers, said Ouyang.
But experts are also worried that the new standards will not have enough influence on the IT industry, as they are not obligatory.
The new guidelines are actually "technical guidance," said Zhu Xuan, director assistant of the CSTC. Technical guidance documents are usually taken as references for industrial operation.
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