The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published a draft of China's first set of national standards for the protection of personal information on February 10, Beijing News reported.
The application for the national standards, entitled "Guide for Personal Information Protection in Information Security Technology and Public and Business Services," are currently being reviewed.
The guideline sets out both general principles and specific requirements with respect to the collection, processing, transmission, utilization and management of personal information in various information systems.
Among those is the "least use" principle. It says that when business companies collect personal information, the range of the content should not cover areas that are not given for the original purposes. Once the personal information has been used, it should be deleted at once.
What remain worrying, however, are available enforcement measures for the new standards, with which their effectiveness is heavily depended on.
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