China's Draft 'Personal Information Protection Law' (Full Translation) | Hacker News Reader

China's Draft 'Personal Information Protection Law' (Full Translation)

newamerica.org

60 pointsdetaro26 comments

China's constitution actually guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, protest and religion.

But those constitutional rights are not enforced, so they may as well not exist.

There has been rule-of-law campaigners in China who push to give the Chinese people more of the rights enshrined in their constitution, but those campaigners tend to be jailed very quickly.

Lol, what? Dude their internet is still censored. What’s there to even discuss here.

Call me when they figure out step 1, then we’ll talk.

China has a critical characteristic of a third world country, which is the unspoken “true” law. On a spectrum, the west is certainly on there but more so as you get closer to power structures like Congress and corporations. But the trumpian shithole countries have ‘free elections’ like Russia, and now hilariously I just found out from you China has freedom of speech laws.

I’m not sure why it sounds like I’m taking this out on you (because I don’t mean to).

Why the hell is Stanford associated with this farce?

> But the trumpian shithole countries have ‘free elections’ like Russia, and now hilariously I just found out from you China has freedom of speech laws.

The Soviet Union had freedom of speech in its constitution also.

The point is that those rights exist only on paper, and so will the rights defined in this new personal information protection law.

Quoth Idi, the greatest man that has ever been:

“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

I generally agree, but why "true" law is a characteristic of a third world country? To me, current American woes are associated with breaking of that "true" law - that is, unspoken agreement in society to treat things certain way. When somebody starts adhering to the letter of the law, but completely against the spirit of the law, they may have situations like today in White House and Capitol.

Those “laws” are honeypots for unsuspecting activists before they become influential and dangerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

The constitution doesn't guarantee them. Most clauses in the constitution come with a "unless it goes against the interests of the party" clause.

> China's constitution actually guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, protest and religion.

In a sense, but in a very different sense than the Western liberal democratic tradition views each of those freedoms. Take, for instance religion; Article 36 of the Constitution states:

---[art 36]

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of religious belief.

No state organ, social organization or individual shall coerce citizens to believe in or not to believe in any religion, nor shall they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do not believe in any religion.

The state shall protect normal religious activities. No one shall use religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the state’s education system.

Religious groups and religious affairs shall not be subject to control by foreign forces.

---[end]

Speech, assembly, and protest/demonstration are trickier because the problem isn't evident from a single article in isolation. Article 35, on its face, seems to protect them:

---[art 35]

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.

---[end]

But then there's the catch (and this also applies to religion in top of the issues in Art. 36 itself): Articles 51-54

---[start]

Article 51

When exercising their freedoms and rights, citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall not undermine the interests of the state, society or collectives, or infringe upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.

Article 52

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard national unity and the solidarity of all the country’s ethnic groups.

Article 53

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China must abide by the Constitution and the law, keep state secrets, protect public property, observe discipline in the workplace, observe public order, and respect social morality.

Article 54

Citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall have the obligation to safeguard the security, honor and interests of the motherland; they must not behave in any way that endangers the motherland’s security, honor or interests.

---[end]

It can still be summed up as "you have the right to freedom as long as it doesn't infringe on other people's right to freedom", which is the liberal democratic tradition.

Admittedly the responsibilities to "observe discipline in the workplace", "respect social morality" and "safeguarding the honor of the motherland" wouldn't normally be part of a constitution in most places, but some of those kinds of ideas are part of the US 'Oath of Allegiance'.

All that said, rights enshrined in China's constitution are not enforced, but arguably some of the responsibilities are enforced.

I'm not seeing many parallels in the US Oath of Allegiance myself. Is there more than https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learn-about-citizenship/th... ?

I would personally give a different summation. It seems like you're free unless you use that freedom in a way the state doesn't like. Which is a rather ineffective version of freedom, it only guarantees you can do things that you wouldn't need any guarantee for in the first place.

I don't know why you bothered to quote all that drivel.

But for HN readers who don't know any better ...

> No state organ, social organization or individual shall coerce citizens to believe in or not to believe in any religion

The CCP inserts their own layer of bishops, imams etc. at the top of each religion. That means the CCP maintains control of the religious narrative, so that members don't have a religiously-derived moral center.

Thus the final arbiter of right and wrong is the CCP. You can see where this leads.

The Soviet Union tried asking for compromise from the Vatican, but the Pope consisently told them no. (There's a famous article about John Paul II doing that. It was a very short conversation, being a one word answer, "No.") Unfortunately, the Vatican compromised on this going back to 1950 with the CCP.

Regarding lawyers, the CCP has warned HK lawyers to not represent anybody against the state. They have also created parallel social media profiles and sent impostors to client meetings, then revealed the meeting notes to discredit the real lawyers. So clients aren't sure if a lawyer is real or not anymore.

https://www.ucanews.com/news/vatican-cardinal-accused-of-man...

It's because CCP's constitution overrides the China's constitution when there's any conflict. So the freedom of speech, assembly, protest and religion basically means that "as long as it doesn't piss CCP off". Don't make any reasoning about China based on a western standard; In China, CCP comes first before anything else including the national body itself.

Article 25 is interesting. I don't know if there is a similar right under GDPR or the California data protection law.

Article 25: When using personal information to conduct automated decision making, the transparency of the decision making and the fairness and reasonability of the handling result shall be guaranteed. Where an individual believes automated decision making creates a major influence on their rights and interests, they have the right to require personal information handlers to explain the matter, and they have the right to refuse that personal information handlers make decisions solely through automated decision making methods...

It's part of GDPR too. Though probably impossible to implement since people simply dont know why ML systems make their decisions.

The thing is even many ML researchers don't believe that interpretable models are possible without losing accuracy. There's a good episode of Data Skeptic [0] with one of the co-authors of a paper [1] delving into this. They talk about real-world ML models used to predict recidivism as well as medical expert systems.

[0] "Black Boxes Are Not Required" https://podcastaddict.com/episode/107514072

[1] "Why Are We Using Black Box Models in AI When We Don’t Need To? A Lesson From An Explainable AI Competition" https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/f9kuryi8/release/5

Black box models are going to be a problem when we let them make life and death decisions like driving cars.

At some point, one of these models will do something wrong, like hit pedestrians on a regular basis, and a judge will order its owners to "make it stop doing that". Or maybe a new law will be passed to the same effect. Then the owners of the ML model will be in a bit of a pickle if they don't actually know how it works.

One way I have seen the integration of black box models in situations where incorrect decisions are unacceptable (in this case a medical environment) is to implement a good enough solution to the problem using conventional programming techniques, and then give the black box model free reign to provide more accurate answers bounded by the conventional system. In the case I saw, the black box model was able to improve the accuracy by about 10x over the existing system for 90% of the use cases. The other 10% fall back to the existing system and do no worse.

I don't get this because we've seen decision making under pressure, for judges. The conclusions are invariably that even the most reliable indicators are violated occasionally (human intelligence is of course a multi-armed-bandit algorithm so this is exactly what you'd expect, and want). Whether the people making decisions agreed they were experimenting or not did not matter at all. They also weren't able to explain this (and even when they did, they just provided the explanation one of the lawyers provided, which sounds fine, until you realize that of course two lawyers provided an explanation. So they are giving exactly the wrong information to understand the decision: judge chooses between "A, because ..." and "B, because ...", and at that point your decision is about the difference between A and B, not about A or B themselves)

Whilst I have not seen a comparable study with doctors' decision making ... I have very little doubt it's exactly the same. Doctor's AREN'T reliable and are in fact, no matter how hard they deny it, are experimenting on patients and learning from it.

Of course, when you think about more than a single patient, this is what you want. With this I mean you want (ideally many small, some large) mistakes to happen as long as it isn't you under the knife, but you're expecting at some future time it'll be you, because that way the doctors will maximally improve by then. Once you're under the knife, I guess you don't want to see experiments, but yeah, there's a price for skill.

And there's a price to be paid in mistakes for human skill as well. Even for doctors. Even for surgeons.

Pharmaceuticals are much more of a "black box" . It's all about statistics, and if tesla seriously wants people to use SD, it will have to be a lot better, beyond placebo statistical significance.

GDPR has Article 22 and Article 13 2f.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-13-gdpr/

In soviet China, your personal information protects the law.

In soviet China the law personally informs you.

"Laws are strict. Violations are rampant. Enforcement is selective."

See https://996.icu/#/en_US

I think it is more for business entities instead of government.

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