Students embark on data-privacy project

As the country fights against personal information leaks, a small group of university students in Beijing decided to take the matter into their own hands, in a bid to safeguard the public interest.

Zhang Mengyi, a law school student at the Communication University of China, and three of her classmates are embarking on an experimental project to create a report in 2013 that will show the development of China's personal information protection laws.

"I used to receive spam e-mails, mostly for real estate and shopping promotions, which really annoyed me, since I had to delete them over and over again," said Zhang, the team's coordinator.

"I didn't think those e-mails were related to personal information leaks until I started studying for this project," she said.

Students said the project allowed them to think seriously about the importance of protecting their personal information in a legal way, instead of simply complaining about spam.

The team has collected a significant amount of domestic and foreign material for the project, and interviewed officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, hoping to understand China's policies and regulations in the area.

"There are guidelines for personal information protection in our country, according to the ministry, but they have little impact compared with a law," Zhang said.

"If the guidelines are upgraded into a law, they will play a more important role in protecting personal information."

During the summer holidays, the four students distributed 250 questionnaires in their hometowns in Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, and posted 100 online questionnaires.

"The questionnaire targeted people from every walk of life. We wanted to know the respondents' experiences and feelings after their personal information was leaked, and what they think about the current legal protection system," team member Lin Jie said.

Deng Yang, the only male student in the team, planned to contact some of the companies and pretend to be a buyer of personal information.

However, he gave up on that project after he found out that it would be illegal under current laws.

The team created a micro blog account on Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like service, to let more people know about the overall project, and to exchange views with experts in the area.

"Many people are affected by personal data leaks, but few claim their rights. We hope that our project can not only be helpful for ourselves, but also enhance the public's awareness," Zhang said.