How to Protect Personal Data?

With higher Internet penetration all over the world, how to generate and use Internet users’ data is a new social challenge. On the 2019 Summer Davos forum in Dalian, Liaoning province, a series of panels have focused on the protection of personal data.

Visiting professor Shekhar Saxena at Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health said that some mobile phone apps for psychological counseling collect users’ personal data for individualized services, but the users sometimes cannot differ privacy and safety from medical needs. This leads to potential risk for personal data leakage.

In recent years, many global Internet giants face data leak problems and international supervisors’ investigation. These investigations and even litigation are not only correlated to users’ privacy protection, but also to whether these companies are abusing users’ data to conduct unfair competition and monopolize the market.

Katheryn Rosen, adjunct senior research scholar of international and public affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs said that relevant government agencies should consider building access mechanism for data collection to restrict the number of bodies that can collect data. Internet platforms must clearly inform users of the safety issues before collecting their data to raise public awareness.

Chen Lei, chief executive officer of Xunlei said that blockchain as a newly emerged technology can operate without any intermediate business, and the data restored in a blockchain can never be tampered. Thus, it might provide new ways to protect personal data.

Madhukar, director of Omidyar Network India said that we can develop a set of virtual verification system where citizens’ personal data will be connected with a virtual account for Internet using and kept by third-party authorities. In this way, the Internet users’ behavior can be monitored and at the same time their data protected from Internet operators’ abuse.

“To protect data and privacy, governments and NGOs need to work together to effectively monitor mobile phone apps.” said Marsha Ma, vice president of China for Booking.com.

July 28, 2019

Source: www.chinanews.com

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