A Research On Primary Theory Of Legal Protection Of Personal Data In The Light Of Big Data

Big Data is a new phenomenon arising from the rise of Internet, Web of Things and electronic technology, which means a huge scale aggregation of data that cannot be processed in reasonable period of time with traditional software and hardware. Nowadays, Big Data is used more likely to indicate the data mining in very huge scale of data by developed computing ability, in order to gain value or information. With the development of social informatization, personal data grows constantly fast, which cover such a vast of variety of life details that a person’s life could be accurately depicted by it. Since web is indispensible to personal life, the amount of electronic dossier will grow bigger and bigger. In the predictable future the scale of data will go beyond anyone’s control and knowledge.Certainly, Big Data brings problems. For one thing, Big Data makes the personal privacy more vulnerable. For another, Big Data puts personal information in a more dangerous place. Yet this is not the whole story, nor the biggest problem it brings to law. In this thesis I will argue that Big Data makes the privacy and personal information legal protection weaker by creating a new type of power which is based on the possess of huge amount of data and the ability of data analyzing. We all use a wrong metaphor of the Big Brother in Nineteen-eighty-four by George Orwell to Big Data problems, which will be criticized in this thesis and I will argue to use a better metaphor to understand Big Data, which is the court in the Trial by Franz Kafka.Legal protection about the Big Data problems shall be discussed in the light of the new type of power that Big Data creates, which leads us to the reality known as in this thesis the fall of individuals. I treat the Big Data problems as a bundle of problems that goes in a similar direction and connected to each other raised by the reality of the fall of individuals. The big picture involves the interest and value conflicts between individuals, business and government. Therefore the bundle of problems is not merely a civil law topic, otherwise, it is a problem about administration law and constitution law, which makes it a legal philosophical problem. Since the study of personal data concentrates for a long time in civil law area, it surely would be too limited to see the whole picture as I will discuss later.This thesis focuses on the bundle of personal data protection problems and the new type of power, in order to establish a theoretical picture of ruling order. After the comparison of legislative activity about the Big Data problems of different nations, I will offer a detailed possibility of the development of law.In Chapter 1, this thesis investigates the background of protection of personal data, including the development of technology and the attention it draws from the governments and societies of different countries. The main question it is going to answer is that what kind of problem we are facing since the conception of personal data comes into being?In Chapter 2, this thesis discusses two understandings of protection of personal data to answer the question that how do we deem the meaning of protection of personal data? It involves the comparison of Big Brother metaphor and the Court metaphor, which leads us to fall of individuals as the very reality and base of the topic.In Chapter 3, it rethinks the traditional understanding of personal data protection and trys to establish a new way to understand it in the light of fall of individuals. In this Chapter, the thesis is going to compare the old conception of privacy and the new understanding of privacy in an internet age, and combines and processes the theory of personal data protection and explains the key points of a system of personal data protection.In Chapter 4, this thesis is going to depict a theoretical picture of the information society order, which is going to give the answer to the question that what kind of order we can expect in personal data protection. This chapter reveals each different role played by individual, enterprise and government, and analyses the rule of information society in order to answer the question that how the new order fits the old one. As the conclusion of the whole thesis, this chapter treats the protection of personal data as a mutual issue influenced by all the three parties.