Big data, while widely used to help economic and social development, has also brought new challenges to social governance. At the recent Tsinghua-Columbia Forum on Internet Law in Beijing, experts explored data ownership and privacy.

In 2015, China’s State Council issued guidelines to boost the development of big data, which for the first time regarded big data as a fundamental national strategic resource.

Shen Weixing, dean of the School of Law at Tsinghua University, said that 22 percent of the world’s GDP is closely related to the digital economy, and China’s digital economy accounts for about 30 percent of its GDP.

Only by addressing the legal attributes and the distribution of data ownership can we protect the development and utilization of big data, Shen said.

In terms of the rights distribution of data, Shen said that contracts, algorithms and laws provide different approaches, but legal rights distribution underlies them all. In recent years, China has revised the relevant laws and tried to find solutions to problems related to the digital economy.

In China’s General Provisions of the Civil Law adopted in 2017, Articles 111 and 127 refer to personal information and data, respectively.

From the perspective of dispute resolution, Article 111 stipulates protecting the personal information of individuals, and it prohibits illegally collecting, using, processing or transmitting others’ personal information. Illegal sales, provision and disclosure of personal information are prohibited. However, Shen said that the article fails to articulate data rights.

Article 127 recognizes the protection of data and online virtual assets, but leaves details to the more specified laws and regulations to come in those areas, Shen continued.

Shen expressed his hope that the development of big data and artificial intelligence based on personal data can be protected through legal system design.

“Data should not just be protected for privacy. More importantly, it should be fully utilized,” Shen said. Administrative regulations, technical standards and implementation rules need to work together for the protection of personality and property rights.

Benjamin Liebman, director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School, analyzed the role of algorithms in bail, sentencing and parole in the United States and the application of algorithms in court.

In China, the rapid development of artificial intelligence is a hot topic; in the United States, it is no exception, Liebman said, expressing strong interest in artificial intelligence’s ability to predict whether individuals will commit crimes.

If the research is accurate, more accurate identification and assessment of crime risks can reduce the number of imprisoned people. Artificial intelligence will be a part of the sentencing and parole adjudication system. Algorithms can limit human prejudice and predict more accurately the degree of human danger.

Yang Ming, a professor at Peking University Law School, said that data ownership is a question about empowerment. Big data improves the ability to imitate. Therefore, people need to be aware that artificial intelligence can produce both knowledge expansion effects and offset effects. How the intellectual property system responds to the problem of using data to improve the ability to imitate is worthy of attention. Intellectual property law and contract law should try to make use of big data to play a role in knowledge expansion and minimize the offset effects.

Zhang Min, an associate professor from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, focused on how to use personalized recommendations to achieve user satisfaction when pushing information.

Zhang reminded that in terms of personalized recommendation, it is very important to achieve true customization. If you recommend the same information to everyone, it is the failure of the algorithm. As such, you need the relevant information of the user, and this brings privacy protection issues.

Digital currency was also a topic at this forum.

“A central bank’s digital currency stores the value of money in a digital form and as a form of currency exchange. Different from Bitcoin, it is a form of money supported by the state as a responsible party,” said Gao Simin, an associate professor from the School of Law at Tsinghua University.

If all countries issue digital currency, it will change the mode of financial system supervision and even the mode of digital trading to a large extent, which is why countries are paying special attention to the central bank’s digital currency, Gao said.

Gao continued that the future development of digital currency depends largely on whether the major economies will choose digital currency and generate a network effect.

This article was edited and translated from Legal Daily.