Exclusive | China will in time use machines to execute Data Security Law, senior scientist with role in policymaking says
- Identification of key data ‘cannot lean on human power forever’, scientist commissioned by Beijing to formulate data security policy says
- Primary challenge is making sure standards of defining ‘key data’ are ‘scientific and rational’, Beijing-based data privacy lawyer says
The law, in effect since September 2021, is the country’s first legislation designed to regulate the processing and utilisation of data.
“China has always relied on manual judgment to discern important data from general data,” the core expert involved in formulating China’s data security policy told the Post. The university professor asked to remain anonymous as he is not authorised to speak to the media.
He said although government officials had talked about standards and specifications, ways to identify key data remained uncertain in practice.
“The premise of safeguarding key data is to firstly identify it, which definitely cannot lean on human power forever as the data volume to be dealt with is astronomical,” he said.
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This is about to change. Although he did not give details on how the process would be automated, the scientist stressed that the crux of the technology was to transform key data into objects that could be identified, registered, monitored, and reported by computers.