The Research On The Criminal Violations Of Citizens’ Personal Information

With the development of Chinese society and the coming of the information age,citizen’s personal information leakage problem is particularly prominent. Protectingthe interests of citizen’s personal information well is the need of a new era of the ruleof law. Although some terms and regulations about personal information protectionare added to PRC Criminal Law Amendment Act(7), in the face of the complicatedsocial life, there are still many respects need to be explored, clarified, improved andperfected in the criminal judicial practice in an effort to adapt to the development ofthe legal system in our society.This article consists of four chapters, which is mainly from the perspective ofcriminal law to discuss some related issues. The author puts forward her ownopinions through vivid analysis and discussions.In Chapter One, we find the necessity to give the criminal punishment to theincreasingly higher citizens’ personal information violations at the present stage byanalyzing the current situation in China. Also in Chapter One, the concept and thefeatures of the criminal violations of citizens’ personal information are clarified. Wedefine the criminal violations of citizens’ personal information as the crime of sellingand illegally providing citizens’ personal information and the crime of illegally obtaincitizens’ personal information. At the same time, by studying on the legislation offoreign countries and related areas, we find the characteristics and advances of theirlaws, which will enlighten the legislation of our country.In Chapter Two, there are regulations on the violations of citizens’ personalinformation from the Constitution, the civil laws, the administrative laws, thecriminal laws of China and so on. By analyzing the related regulations of protectingcitizens’ personal information in different parts in Chinese current laws, we find theweaknesses in Chinese citizens’ personal information protection legal system. Thefirst weakness is the lack the special laws as all current regulations in this area arescattered and not systematic. The second weakness is that, in criminal laws, we lack the previous laws to be cited. Under the principle of restraining nature of criminallaws, we cannot punish the criminal behaviors timely, effectively and forcefully.In Chapter Three, we discuss and clarify the defining characteristics of anoffensive behavior to personal information from an angle of the constitutive elementsof a crime. As far as the crime object is concerned, the author demonstrates herpersonal opinion by looking over different academic viewpoints. The author clarifiesthe definition and scopes of the objective aspects of such crime. She also gives viableand practical views on what constitutes a serious case by studying on differentschools of thoughts. And when it comes to the subject of the crime, the authoranalyses the crime subject in the form of a natural person and a unit of selling andillegally providing citizens’ personal information crime and the illegally obtaincitizens’ personal information crime. At the same time, the author also finds someloopholes in defining the subject of such a crime.In Chapter Four, the author gives the suggestions to improve the legislation ofcriminal violations of citizens’ personal information from the current status quo.Firstly, in an effort to perfect its law system, we should complete the legislation of theprevious law to make the regulations more systematic. Meanwhile, we should perfectthe criminal laws to differ the punishment for status violators to non-status violatorsto make the punishment more differentiated, to raise the maximum punishmentprescribed for this kind of crime, to expand the scope for crime subject of the sellingand illegally providing citizens’ personal information crime. Secondly, we shouldperfect the prosecution procedures of this kind of crime. More specifically, we shouldmake this kind of crime the cases of private prosecution in a conditional and restrictedway, apply the principle of inversion of the burden of proof or the rules of criminalpresumption. To all the suggestions above, the author gives her convincingdemonstrations.