Note: I wrote this piece in May 2022 as part of a comprehensive CAC report by DigiChina project. Unfortunately, the report did not progress as planned, so I am now sharing my writing here. I would like to thank Johanna Costigan and Graham Webster for editing it. In China’s personal data regulation regime, quite a few government authorities have been playing a role, and the Cyberspace...
Federated Learning Federated Learning and Privacy: Flower’s federated learning framework: Medium post: Federated Learning 101 with FEDn – Practical Federated Learning with Azure Machine Learning: AWS post: Applying Federated Learning for ML at the Edge – Synthetic Data What Privacy Officers Need to Know About Synthetic Data: a potential vendor service: Differential Privacy Code...
Writing – Knowns and Unknowns About China’s New Draft Cross-Border Data Rules (Nov 5, 2021), a collaboration piece analyzing the situation of China’s cross-border data transfer. Seven Major Changes in China’s Finalized Personal Information Protection Law (Sept. 15, 2021), a collaboration piece comparing the final version with the draft version of China’s PIPL to explore the...
I recently published this article here, as a part of the DigiChina Project, based at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and a joint effort with New America.
California AG office on March 11th released a second round of modifications for their proposed regulations to implement the California’s Consumer Privacy Act, aka CCPA, among which Section 999.315(d) gives consumers a global opt-out option through a single-click button embedded in the browser. If the rule gets passed, consumers can stop companies from “selling” (as broadly defined by CCPA) their...
It is no longer new to say that artificial intelligence (AI) needs free flow of data. Data feeds AI systems, enabling them to learn patterns from the data, solve new problems, and keep evolving. To what extent this process can be optimized largely depends on its capability of obtaining huge volumes of diversified and up-to-date data. This is how free flow of data can help AI. As explained below...
Recently I completed a research project on Asia-Pacific privacy law, which satisfied my long-time craving for exploring in details the privacy law and enforcement regime of this region beyond mainland China. After reading the statutes, government reports, and articles relating to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, India, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, I...
A recent report from the UK’s privacy regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), warned that organizations participating in the real-time bidding (RTB) system, a major business mode adopted by the online targeted advertising industry, should not rely on “legitimate interests” under the GDPR Article 6 to justify their data processing. RTB is a complex automated ad exchange...
In the past ten days, the Cyberspace Administration of China (“CAC”) released two important draft rules, the Measures of Cybersecurity Review (网络安全审查办法(征求意见稿)) and the Measures of Data Security Management (数据安全管理办法(征求意见稿)), seeking public comments. (DigiChina of New America has translated both of them into English: here and here.) Within China’s law hierarchy, a title with “Measures” generally...
On February 7, 2019, German’s antitrust authority, the German Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”), issued a decision about the abuse-of-dominance rules, to ban Facebook from combining user information collected from non-Facebook platforms – including Facebook-owned services like WhatsApp and Instagram, and other third-party websites and mobile apps – and associating the information to user’s Facebook...
