Amidst Increased Government Surveillance, Chinese Internet Users Finally Gain Important Online Privacy Protections

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Techdirt stories about China have been relentlessly grim in recent years, offering a depressing vision of an online world under ever-greater surveillance, with correspondingly more systems for censoring every digital thought. But it's important not to get too apocalyptic, and to remember that life goes on. Just like their counterparts in the West, people in China are using the Internet for more and more of their daily lives. Arguably a greater problem than government surveillance for most people is the lack of privacy protections under Chinese law, which has led to highly-personal online information routinely being gathered and sold by third parties.In this context, the Caixin site has details of what it calls a "landmark privacy case" that may help to rein in some of that widespread abuse. The original complaint was brought by Weibo, China's version of Twitter, against an erstwhile partner, Maimai, which offers an enterprise chat app of the same name.

An intellectual property court in Beijing has just made one of China's first precedent-setting rulings on the issue by upholding a lower court's ruling against Maimai. The original case was brought nearly two years ago by Weibo, which said its millions of users had their publicly available personal data improperly mined by Maimai.

the court issued an article on its official microblog on Wednesday laying out guidance for similar cases involving user privacy when data is publicly available on sites like Weibo. That guidance gave six instances of what constitutes "improper" use of such data, including the potential to harm a user's welfare and disturbing order on the internet.Those policies were part of the court's broader opinion that third parties who gather such publicly available user information from services like Weibo should not violate individual privacy without making a concerted effort to get authorization from both platform operators and actual users.

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Last Chance To Tell The Librarian Of Congress What's Important For A New Register Of Copyrights

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The (still) new Librarian of Congress created a bit of a fuss last year in effectively forcing the existing Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, (the head of the US Copyright Office) out of a job. Pallante has since (of course) found a new gig heading up an industry trade group, the Association of American Publishers, with a fairly long history of being against the public, against the internet, against the blind and against fair use.The removing of Pallante kciked off a bunch of ridiculous conspiracy theories that made little sense and had almost no basis in reality. It's pretty clear that Pallante was removed from her job because she had actively, and publicly, reached out to Congress to ask that she no longer have to report to Hayden. That seems like fairly basic insubordination and a fairly standard reason why a boss might fire you.Either way, the fuss over Pallante losing her job resulted in Hayden promising to listen to all stakeholders about who should replace Pallante. To that end, she launched an online survey asking people what they'd like to see in a new Copyright Office boss. Frankly, this... feels kind of gimmicky and silly. Hayden got the job she got because she actually understands a lot of these issues. Yes, she should absolutely be listening to the public and weighing lots of thoughts, but an online survey... just feels like the wrong mechanism. And, of course, such things are prone to ballot stuffing (from all sides). If you look around, it's not hard to find some fairly crazy and "not-quite-in-touch-with-reality" groups and individuals who are telling people just how to stuff the ballot box, including some nonsense that completely misrepresents the role.So I'm not going to tell anyone how they should fill out the survey, but I would suggest that people think carefully about what role the head of the Copyright Office should play. Should it be a job where the focus is on protecting the interests of a few gatekeepers who have spent years sucking up the copyrights of actual creators while claiming to represent artists? Or should it be someone who is focused on the actual job of the Copyright Office, such as modernizing the role of the copyright office, making it easier to research who holds copyrights on what works, and who is actually focused on the core principles of copyright law -- that it promote the progress of science -- as laid out in the Constitution?The online survey closes tomorrow, Tuedsay January 31st (possibly today by the time you're reading this), so please get your thoughts in sooner rather than later.

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