Research On The Case Of Crawling Citizens' Personal Informatio

The original purpose of web crawler is to speed up information acquisition and improve data retrieval efficiency.With the continuous development and improvement of its functions and technology,it has gradually been applied to the field of illegal and criminal activities,including the situation where crawling and selling personal information on the Internet constitutes the crime of infringing on citizens’ personal information.As a new legal field,how to accurately judge the crime and non crime of this behavior while respecting technology neutrality,and how to balance the contradiction between personal personality rights and freedom of information flow in the era of big data are all problems that must be faced to establish and improve China’s personal information protection legal system.The controversial issues in judicial practice mainly focus on three aspects: whether the act of crawling personal information online is illegal;The necessity and coverage of the judgment of "violating relevant national regulations" in the crime of infringing on citizens’ personal information;Whether crawling public personal information constitutes a crime of infringing on citizens’ personal information.This article takes Xu Guocheng’s case of infringing on citizens’ personal information and Wu’s case of infringing on citizens’ personal information as the research objects.Through regression analysis of crawler technology and legal principles,it is believed that: firstly,simply crawling personal information does not have illegality.By analyzing the operating principle of crawlers,it can be concluded that crawlers,as a neutral technology,are a tool for accelerating information acquisition and do not have objective illegality or infringe on the rights and interests of the crawled party.Therefore,they should not be considered illegal behavior.Secondly,"violating relevant national regulations" should be independently judged and its scope should not include industry rules.If the provision is removed as a suggestive element,it will inevitably lead to ambiguity in semantic understanding,and clearly informing the defendant of the violation of the preceding law through the judgment document can effectively avoid criminal expansion.Meanwhile,due to the non mandatory and universal nature of industry rules,they should not be recognized as relevant national regulations.Thirdly,crawling and selling publicly available personal information does not constitute the crime of infringing on citizens’ personal information.The disclosure of personal information by the rights subject is a reasonable punishment of the right to personal information,and crawling public personal information does not infringe on the legal interests of the right to personal information;The sale was not explicitly rejected by the rights holder or had a significant impact on personal rights,therefore it is not illegal.