Legal Protection For The Financial Privacy Right

With the increasing maturity of the financial industry, the economic value of personal information has become increasingly prominent and the value of privacy interests is no longer confined to a personality. It expands into a property interests and forms the financial privacy. Financial privacy is an extension of privacy in the financial sector. It regards credit information as its core and has property attributes. European and American countries and regions have formed a systematic and mature system of legal protection of financial privacy based on their deep jurisprudence. At present, there is not a sound financial privacy law system, the concept of the financial privacy and uniform legal protection norms in China yet. On one hand this situation is not conducive to safeguarding the rights of financial consumers and on the other hand it may influence the long term development of the financial sector. Therefore, China should base on national situations and learn from foreign experience outstanding legislation which we can make benefit from. Only in this way an appropriate system of financial privacy protection can be formed.This article has four parts. The first part elaborates the concept and the attributes of the financial privacy following the privacy. Then the first part makes a conclusion of the origin of financial privacy legal protection. Once more the article elaborates the necessity of legal protection of financial privacy from the aspects of property attribute, information asymmetry, financial regulation, the development of the Internet banks and credit system construction. At last the first part elaborates the legal basis of the financial privacy legal protection, namely,"implied term" theory, public policy theory and agent obligation by the case of Tournier, Peterson and Diowharzadeh.The second part elaborates the current situations of the financial privacy legal protection by the examples of American, EU, Germany and Switzerland. This part also concludes the outstanding legislative experiences which are useful to China from the aspects of subject, object, exception and legal remedy.The third part makes an investigation of China’s legislative practice and concludes the current situations from the aspects of subject, object, exception and legal remedy. Some shortages of the legislative practice can be seen from the conclusions.The forth part elaborates some legislative proposals on the subject, object, exception and legal remedy by learning from the outstanding legislative practice of the foreign countries. Writer hopes that these proposals can be useful to improve the financial privacy legal protection system. The proposals include that extending the subject to all natural persons associated with financial transactions and the object shall include personally identifiable information, transaction information and derived information. Also the situations of exception shall be completed?,the civil liability shall be strengthened.