Legal Analysis Of The Internet Credit Reporting In The View Of Individual Rights Protection

In January 2015, the People’s Bank of China issued the Notice Concerning the Preparation of Personal Credit Reporting Business. According to the Notice, eight institutions including Zhima Credit are required to make preparations for the personal credit reporting business. This kind of credit mode is called the “Internet Credit Reporting”(ICR) by the scholars because of the close connection between the newly approved credit institutions and the Internet, especially in the aspect of institution nature and business mode. ICR is a new type of credit reporting business. It has significantly promoted the national credit business; at the same time, however, the data collection acts and the crediting scores by the ICR institutions has easily placed the individual rights at risk.Compared with the severe situations of ICR faced by the individuals rights, China has lagged behind in the legislation of individuals rights protection: China has not made any specific law to protect to the personal data; at the same time, the existing rules are not only low-level and too general, but also, to a large extent, function as industry regulatory rules rather than right-based rules. The individual right settings are not reasonable either. Thus, this further aggravates the infringements of individual rights under the ICR.Different from it in China, the personal credit reporting business is mature in Europe, United States and other developed countries, which also have the perfect legislation for personal electronic data. Therefore, on the basis of learning from foreign advanced practices, this article intends to conduct some institutional construction for the protection of individual rights under the ICR so that this will help to ease the tensions between the individual rights protection and free flows of data. Specifically, this article consists of the following three chapters:The first chapter makes some basic analysis to the ICR. It introduces and defines the ICR using the new credit reporting mode of We Bank as a reference, then analyzes the specific characteristics of ICR in comparison with the traditional personal credit reporting mode. The first chapter has paved the way for the later legal theoretical analysis.On the basis of the first chapter, the second chapter analyzes the legal problems brought by the ICR to the protection of individual rights. It introduces the following problems: the ambiguous boundaries of individual data collection scope owing to the traditional rules’ inapplicablity to ICR; the insufficient accuracy of ICR crediting scores due to the basic data segmentation. On the basis of clearly understanding the above questions, this chapter analyzes the unreasonable personal right settings, which leads to the infringements of individual rights.In response to all the causes of individual right infringements, the third chapter tries to establish some institutional structure to perfect the protection of individual rights under the ICR: in order to determine the scope of Internet data collection, this article proposes to follow the Credit Relevance Principle and the Comprehensive Collection Principle and to establish the Negative List of ICR data collection; for the purpose of reducing the inaccurate crediting scores caused by the basic data segmentation, this article proposes to establish a mixed data sharing mechanism consisting of the compulsory sharing by public sector as the main section and the voluntary sharing by private body as the complementary section. After that, this article proposes to focus on the introduction of the Right to Personal Data and Credit Right and to perfect the civil liabilities of ICR and to introduce the institution of reversion of burden of proof.