Research on the Civil Public Interest Litigation System for Personal Information Protection in China
Authors: Liu Yansiqi 
Published: October 2024

At the level of legislative norms, Article 70 of the Personal Information Protection Law includes the infringement of personal information rights and interests of a certain scale and quantity into the scope of regulation, establish a special system for civil society to protect personal information, and endows personal information with corresponding civil public interest protection. Among them, according to the law content, civil public interest litigation prosecution subject by the people's procuratorate, part of the legal consumer organizations and the national net letter determine the organization, but only the procuratorial organ to determine the subject, the rest of the organization has not yet had a clear definition of standard and qualification scope, and between the prosecution subject priority has not yet specific provisions, the prosecution subject qualification and order is not clear, this must be clear and supplement the primary content. Second, the scope of litigation accepting cases fuzzy boundary, it comes down to the conditions of prosecution standard lack of unity, for the number of the victims of size and specific number interval not set the corresponding ladder standard, causing the condition of "many" specific connotation of meaning, so that the trial practice is difficult to present clear scope of accepting cases. In addition, personal information is characterized by a wide range of coverage, high difficulty in screening, and large individual differences in classification attributes. These unique attributes in judicial practice, how to accurately that personal information damage after the specific compensation amount become one of the problems need to be careful, how to ensure timely forensics, evidence collection, the whole process of legal behavior and ensure that the collected evidence has a strong force for another problem, and the plaintiff in the reality claims contain damages are often difficult to get real implement. Finally, for the jurisdiction of the case principle does not consider the particularity of public interest litigation, public interest litigation is a special form of litigation, plus personal information infringement in today's big data era in the background of the main media, more present a "more scattered" cross distribution pattern, cross-regional jurisdiction become "normalized" phenomenon, but the existing regional jurisdiction and level jurisdiction is not enough to achieve efficient target, running some cases will appear unreasonable. For the above problems, based on the reasons behind the mining phenomenon, based on the judicial practice and existing related cases, put forward the improvement of targeted Personal Information Protection in Civil Public Interest Litigation System, the main direction for the following content: first, clear prosecution subject qualification scope and build a clear standard, and based on the further sequence the priority between the subject. Second, we should explore the path to expand the scope of civil public interest litigation for personal information protection, and further clarify the identification standards of prosecution conditions. Third, clarify the basis for determining the amount of compensation, introduce the punitive compensation mechanism, and set up the applicable criteria of regional jurisdiction in line with the characteristics of civil public interest litigation of personal information protection. At the same time, improve the cooperation mechanism with relevant departments, effectively enhance the cooperation strength to help personal information protection.