19 September, 2007
Personal Data to be Removed from Judicial Yuan’s Online Case Database
The Judicial Yuan has maintained a public and searchable database of criminal, civil, and administrative court decisions in Chinese since 1988. The Judicial Yuan, however, announced in July 2007 that personal data would be redacted effective 1 July from judicial decisions available through the database citing privacy considerations. The ease at which the public could access judicial decisions through the Judicial Yuan’s online portal had led to a growing number of complaints in recent years from parties to the decisions over the availability of their personal data. Some specific personal data - national identification numbers, birth dates, and residential addresses - had previously been removed from cases published online.
The Judicial Yuan has relied on following the spirit of the Computer Processed Personal Data Protection Act to support the change in policy. Under the Act, personal data means a natural person's name, date of birth, national identification number, special features, fingerprints, marital, family, education, occupation, health, medical history and financial status, social activities and other data which is sufficient to identify such person. The Judicial Yuan has indicated that names, national identification numbers, birth dates, residential addresses telephone numbers and bank account numbers will be removed. The most notable effect will be that it will no longer be possible to identify the individual parties to judicial decisions within the online database.
