Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay

Comparative Law, Data Protection Focused

Data Privacy Law in China: Comparison with the EU and U.S. Approaches

By Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay. Updated on

Data Privacy in China is usually only mentioned in discussions on state surveillance, and the legitimate concerns it raises. A lesser known question is the development of obligations for companies towards consumers, i.e. consumer privacy rules. This post focuses on their evolution, culminating with China’s Cybersecurity Law and its guidelines, and their comparison with data privacy rules in the U.S. and the EU.

This post summarizes the main results of my law review article “China’s Approach on Data Privacy Law: A Third Way Between the U.S. and the EU?” to be published in the Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs, vol. 8.1. It comprehensively details the results of a research that is part of my Ph.D earned from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The present blog post only aims at “briefly” presenting the main findings in a more casual fashion.

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All Data Protection Laws in China (2020 List)

By Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay. Updated on

In this post, I try to keep track of all data privacy laws in China available in English. If no full translation is available, I do my best to link to some relevant comments published by observers. I find it convenient to have all of them gathered in one place, and I hope it can be helpful to you as well.

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U.S. Data Privacy Laws: CCPA, HIPAA, COPPA… and soon a Federal Data Protection Act?

By Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay. Updated on

The U.S. data protection law landscape is moving fast since the GDPR arrived in the EU. This happens mostly at the state level so far, the CCPA being the best known of these new laws. The U.S. doesn’t yet have a nation-wide federal data privacy law, and relies on several sectoral laws. But this day will come, as the need to unify a patchwork of U.S. data privacy laws grows.

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We Should Weaponize Personal Data to Fight Covid-19, with Privacy in Mind

By Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay. Updated on

OPINION. In its fight against Covid-19, China makes intensive use of the personal data of its people, while the EU doesn’t – yet. Big data analytics “for the common good”, including large-scale monitoring of population movements and identification of potential cases is a significant innovation in the management of this epidemic. This should be done, but with privacy in mind.

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Schrems vs. Facebook: will the EU Standard Contractual Clauses survive?

By Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay. Updated on

Will the EU Standard Contractual Clauses survive the new battle between Facebook and Maximilian Schrems? On October 3, 2017, the Irish High Court issued a decision requesting the CJEU to evaluate the validity of the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). These clauses are used to export personal data collected in the European Economic Area (EEA) to a third country.

By this decision, the High Court acknowledges that there are “well-founded grounds for believing that [the EU Standard Contractual Clauses] are invalid,” and that it is therefore necessary to refer them to the CJEU to ensure uniform  data protection in the EU (see paragraph 338 of the judgment).

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