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But the tale of professor Guo Bing, and other consumer protection cases bubbling up there, are proof that growing, bottom-up demands for privacy in China are starting to be acknowledged - and experts say taking those tensions into account is key to understanding the implications of the looming privacy law.Ĭhina is now one of the world’s most active players on digital regulation, and its crackdown on ride-hailing app Didi is just the latest example. It’s easy for Americans to be dismissive of Chinese privacy efforts and cynical about how much such a law, under Beijing’s regime, could possibly protect civilians from government surveillance or companies' bad behavior. There have also been recent developments in Africa and India, which is likely to adopt its own general data protection law by the end of the year. Several states have already passed their own privacy rules - the Colorado Privacy Act is expected to become law any day - as have Europe and Brazil. States and foreign powers, meanwhile, are moving faster than the federal government. “The rest of the world is leaving us behind.”Ĭongress has been slow-moving on a comprehensive national data privacy law, and the Biden administration has yet to formally call for such protections. China is about to go ahead of us,” said Senate Commerce Consumer Protection Chair Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). Some in Congress are “deeply alarmed” that China is outpacing the U.S. The unusual ruling has become an important and curious data point as Washington tries to wrap its head around China’s evolving privacy landscape and assess the superpower’s fast-advancing privacy law, which is likely to pass later this fall - well before the United States has its own privacy law on the books. Dismayed, the professor files the first-ever lawsuit there over the use of facial recognition - and in April, shockingly, he wins. Case in point: A Chinese professor goes to a zoo in Hangzhou, which requires a scan of his face before he can enter. Yet, as the Chinese surveillance state grows, so does public pushback. But in China, where citizens had already been subjected to mass tracking by the government, the crisis helped expand an authoritarian system that has been refined and cemented as the norm. The Covid-19 pandemic has heightened digital surveillance around the world. Prior to joining POLITICO in 2019, Alex was a Metro reporter at The New York Times, where she spent three years at the helm of the popular New York Today column. She is also a lead author of Future Pulse, POLITICO’s weekly dispatch exploring how tech is shaping health care. Levine, a technology and politics reporter at POLITICO whose coverage focuses on privacy and data protection issues in the U.S.

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