On Criminal Protection Of Personal Information

Personal information embodies the general personality interests of natural person, as well as the economic value brought about by its availability. The information reflects a certain personality value no matter people know it themselves, and the information subject will face the risk of damage to personality and other legal rights and interests when the information has been illegal used. The protection of personal information is related to the Constitution, Civil Law, Criminal Law, Administrative Law, and many other law departments. Personal information should be protected by criminal law because of its vulnerability, low-risk of the injurious act, the function and final guaranteeing of criminal law. But the criminal law protection for personal information should be limited to a moderate scope.There are only some regulations to protect personal information indirectly from the perspective of the interests of privacy in the criminal law for a long time. As the accessorial clause of the Seventh Amendment to Criminal Law, crime of infringing personal information provide a direct basis for the criminal protection of personal information. There are two independent accusation in the seventh term of the Seventh Amendment to Criminal Law are crime of sale and illegally providing citizens'individual information and crime of illegally obtaining citizens'individual information respectively.Analysis and research on the extraterritorial legislation could provide useful experience and lessons to our legislation and judicial practice. Compared with the extraterritorial legislation and analyze Chinese current situation of legislation, we will find that there are some defects of the criminal protection of personal information, such as the criminal law can not put into practice effectively because of the lackage of the relevant laws, the type of the act pattern is insufficient, the scope of criminal object of crime of illegally obtaining personal information is too narrow, public prosecution is the only means of prosecution to the crime of infringing personal information, and so on. In view of this, we should perfecting legislation of the criminal protection of personal information as belows: strengthening coordination between criminal law and other relevant laws, enlarging the scope of criminal object appropriately, the act pattern of infringing personal information should be more reasonable and change the means of prosecution from public prosecution to private prosecution.