The Legal Protection Of Sensitive Personal Information

In the context of the rapid development of Internet technologies,people's lives have undergone major changes due to the widespread use of big data technologies.Technologies such as “cloud computing” are constantly improving,entertainment and communication platforms such as Weibo and Jinritoutiao are emerging,making it possible for people to receive goods,enjoy services,and obtain information without leaving home.At the same time,personal information has surpassed the personal value and reflects its social value.The continuous improvement of information business value and its high liquidity characteristic make a large amount of personal data and transaction information inevitably collected,processed and utilized.Then the information protection issues have arisen.The boundaries of the rational use of information are gradually blurred,resulting in the leakage and abuse of personal information,cyber fraud and even personal infringement.In the personal information,there is a kind of information that is of a special nature.Improper collection or use can easily cause risks or violations of the basic rights of the information subject.It is highly sensitive and needs to be treated differently from ordinary personal information.Therefore,it is called sensitive personal information.As the most important part of personal information,sensitive personal information is also facing a huge security threat.Across the world,many countries are following the trend of globalization and new technology development,carrying out legislative reforms on their personal information,and taking measures to protect sensitive personal information.In 2012 the European Commission opened a new round of legislative reforms to the existing protection system in response to the challenges of big data.The General Data Protection Regulations passed in April 2016 gave special attention to sensitive personal information.Based on the complete inheritance of the Personal Data Protection Directive,combined with the new situation emerging in the current era,expanded and supplemented the meaning of sensitive personal information to balancethe contradiction between information use and information security,to provide more comprehensive protection for personal information.The following characteristics can be summarized: First,the EU adopts a unified legislative model to specifically protect personal information.Second,the EU legislation clarifies the categories of sensitive personal information through detailed enumeration.And integrates three types of new personal information into the protection of sensitive personal information,expanding and enriching the connotation.Based on the study of the EU General Data Protection Regulations,this article will also be discussed in five aspects.The first chapter introduces the development of sensitive personal information and the definition of the concept of the EU;the second chapter analyzes the EU's unified legislative model;the third chapter focuses on the legal basis of sensitive personal information protection;and the fourth chapter studies the differential protection mechanism for sensitive personal data of the EU;finally,it is proposed to discuss the legislative reform of personal information protection in China from the General Data Protection Regulations.In contrast,the contradiction between the urgent need of sensitive personal information protection laws and the relative lag of legal regulation is the main reason for the lack of personal information protection legislation.However,in recent years,the protection of sensitive personal information has attracted the attention of domestic law academic.Professor Zhou Hanhua and Professor Qi Aimin proposed the personal information protection law proposal from the perspective of experts and scholars,and some industries(such as the credit industry)began to try to protect personal information.In addition,many companies also began to realize the important of protection of consumer sensitive personal information.Therefore,the introduction of sensitive personal information concepts and differential protection should be the proper meaning of China's personal information protection legislation.Through the exploration of the EU's sensitive personal information protection model,I hope to provide new ideas for the construction of China's personal information protection system.