“I am telling you, but I’m not telling anyone else. If you really have to tell someone else, do not tell them that you heard it from me.”
This kind of disclaimer is often mentioned when people pass on rumors. Unfortunately, it has been elevated legally enshrined in the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法).
The legislature last week pushed through amendments to the act in a rush to finish business before the legislative session ended. The amendment changes the regulations that said if someone wants to use information for research other than that for which it was collected without first obtaining the source’s approval, the collector must first anonymize the information or only use information that has already been anonymized.
This has now been changed so that as long as a third party declares to the source that identifiable information will not be revealed, information can be used in any research.
This amendment is tantamount to announcing that entities that used to be bound to protect information privacy only have to say: “You cannot tell anyone else” to shift responsibility to the next user. They can then provide any personal information to a third party who claims to be engaged in academic research and they can do that without asking the source whether they approve of the use of the data.
This means that government institutions and private organizations can collect personal data from members of the public and they can provide that material to any institution that declares they are engaged in academic research — there are of course no restrictions on the nationality of the institution — as long as that institution declares that it will not reveal any personal information after it has used it.
The doors have now been left open to “academic institutions” in any nation that have an interest of any kind in the personal information of Taiwanese.
That is not all. The amendment also removes the barrier that previously existed between government departments regarding the use of sensitive personal information. That barrier meant that personal information collected by government departments could only be shared if it was required by law or if it was necessary to prevent physical harm or the loss of life, liberty or assets, or to prevent major harm to the rights and interests of a third party.
Now all that is needed to share information is that it is deemed to assist public organs in carrying out their statutory duties or non-public organs to meet their legal obligations. This means that it could be made entirely legal to ask for information from hospital emergency rooms to determine who was involved in the occupation of the Executive Yuan.
Now that responsibility has been shifted away from the original party and the barrier between government departments removed, all that remains is to face the public that has been left standing naked before the state and academic institutions. Put plainly, the Personal Information Protection Act is now nothing but a tool for total social control.
Chiou Wen-tsong is an associate research professor at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae at Academia Sinica.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs