Personal Information Protection Law also applies to local governments

IN A DOCUMENT it released late last month, the State Council, China's Cabinet, urged governments of all levels to strengthen their protection of personal information. Beijing Youth Daily comments on Monday:

Quite a few local governments take it for granted that the personal information of people who receive poverty alleviation money, government subsistence allowances and public subsidized houses, which include their name, home address, identity card number and telephone number, should be disclosed to social scrutiny to prevent the unqualified people from falsely claiming welfare benefits.

Although this utterly transparent practice has effectively avoided the misuse of public resources as intended, it has flouted the Personal Information Protection Law by throwing the disadvantaged recipients into the spotlight.

More worrying is that some grass-roots officials probably assume that the poverty-stricken people should compromise, if not sacrifice, their privacy if they intend to apply for government support. The weak protection of the privacy of vulnerable people saves the local governments the extra trouble of explaining where every cent of their poverty alleviation funds is spent, as it is already public knowledge. Which in some cases, have caused undesirable consequences.

For instance, two years ago, a high-school graduate surnamed Xu from a poor rural family in East China' Shandong province died of sudden cardiac arrest after realizing she had been scammed out of the money that her parents had painstakingly saved to cover some of her tuition fees.

The fraudsters were able to trick her because they knew not only her contact details, but also that she had applied for a student loan. Xu is among the tens of thousands of students in Shandong whose personal information has been leaked to criminal gangs even before they sit in the college entrance exam.

The government should classify the information in its disclosure mechanism into different categories, and fully protect the privacy of personal information. To follow the Government Affairs Disclosure Rules should by no means be an excuse to justify the defiance of the Personal Information Protection Law.