Legal Protection Of Personal Financial Information

In modern economic activities, personal financial information kept by financial organizations such as banks has become important social resource. However, these financial organizations always tend to pursue their own interests at the expense of the privacy of personal financial information and even to use the information to make benefits, leaving personal financial privacy at lurch. Without effective legislation, the inevitable misuse and abuse of personal financial information will be certain to impair the interests of information objects. The protection of personal financial information is seldom touched in the academic circles of China. Moreover, neither has any agreement been reached on the basic issues of the conception and contents of personal financial information, nor is there any common understanding as for the principles of personal financial information protection, the rights and interests of information objects as well as the relevant legal liabilities. Given that today personal financial information is playing a growing important role in protecting natural persons'human rights, promoting information circulation and facilitating the information development, the research on the basic theories and other major issues has significant meaning on building a personal financial information protection system (PFIPS) and improving the personal information legislation in China.The present paper falls into 4 parts:Part 1 is an overview of personal financial information, beginning with the analysis of its contents and characteristics. Personal financial information is the information about individual persons acquired by banks in the business intercourse between the information objects and banks. It includes identity information, business information and credit information, and it is characterized by identification, human rights and property. Its objects are individual persons. Besides, the necessity of protecting personal financial information is also discussed. Protecting personal financial information is the need for protecting human rights, for enhancing information share and cooperation and for promoting the development of information and E-business in our country.Part 2 is about the comparison between personal financial information protection systems (PFIPS) in different countries and regions. As the famous Chinese proverb going"rocks of other mountains can crack jade", experience of other countries and regions can be borrowed when researching the way to protecting personal financial information. The protection systems in the US, European Union, Japan, Swiss, and Taiwan are examined in this part, which can be generalized into two categories: one is separate legislation protection mode represented by the US, the other is comprehensive legislation protection mode represented by the European Union. The former refers to a protection mode in which the personal information in different fields is legislated separately, while the latter points to one under which the protection of information in all fields adopts a uniform standard and is supervised by the same regulation department.The conflicts and checkmates between protection and exposure of personal financial information are discussed in Part 3 with an emphasis put on the forms of conflicts, for instance, the conflicts between personal financial information protection and credit investigation, campaigns of anti-money laundry as well as the consolidated supervision of transnational banks. In addition, a further analysis indicates that the essence of these conflicts is the conflicts in interests and values. Efforts should be made to balance the rights and interests and coordinate the values by following the principles that public interests should always be the top priority while personal interests should be well coordinated and that the credit information ought to be circulated.In view of the shortcomings of the present PFIPS in our country, the writer tries to construct a new system for protecting personal financial information in the last part based on the earlier discussion. Suggestions for building and improving PFIPS are proposed: Firstly, a protection mode suitable for China's national conditions should be adopted, which combines uniform legislation for all fields and self-regulation for different fields; Secondly, it is necessary to set up the basic principles of personal financial information protection, including integration and accuracy principle, opening principle, limited use principle, information object participation principle and security principle; Thirdly, The rights and interests concerning personal financial information protection should be made clearer, which mainly include information deciding right, information privatizing right, information inquiring right, information correcting right, information deleting right and the right to ask for compensation for violated information; Forth, The relevant legal liabilities need to be perfected, especially the liabilities of civil law; Last but not least, the exceptional case relating to personal financial information protection is suggested to be clarified.