On Wednesday, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the standardization administration jointly released a national guideline on personal information protection, which will come into effect on May 1. Beijing News comments:

We live in an age of big data, in which personal information can easily be leaked. For example, when you buy something online, your address, your cellphone number, even your preferences might be collected and sold.

Worse, some illegal gangs might obtain your personal information via illegal channels and use the information to defraud you.

The new national guideline provides detailed, national standards for the stricter protection of personal information.

It makes clear that while general personal information can be collected without requiring a person's permission, sensitive personal information cannot be collected without the clear, unambiguous approval of the person concerned.

Moreover, the new guideline clearly includes as sensitive personal information an individual's biological identity, property and online ID, as well as online browsing records.

By doing so the new regulation provides legal support for the protection of personal information. Many commercial websites have the bad habit of collecting visitors' information without gaining approval, or hiding the "I agree with the collection of my personal information" in an agreement for use form.

According to the new regulation, any commercial websites wishing to collect the personal information of users must describe to the latter in detail how they will collect that information and how that information will be used. The past behavior of commercial websites is thus now illegal.

The new guideline, together with the Cybersecurity Law and some past judicial explanations of the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, will form a complete legal system of personal information protection, and we hope the system will better ensure the safety of personal information.