Putting China’s Personal Information Protection Law in Context

Wednesday, February 23, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Eastern Time)

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About the Event

China’s new Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) has grabbed international attention largely because it imposes costs on foreign companies with Chinese customers and pushes us even further in the direction of data localization. The law does all that – and in conjunction with the new Data Security Law and other new regulations, it will also have a huge impact within China’s borders by reining in big domestic internet companies when they collect user data, make decisions with it, and seek to monetize it. Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, will explain how the new PIPL came about, what it means for Chinese and foreign businesses, and how it fits into a much larger landscape of accelerating Chinese government regulation of the digital sphere. USALI Executive Director Katherine Wilhelm will moderate.

About the speaker

Graham Webster is a research scholar at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, where he leads the DigiChina Project. DigiChina is a collaborative project to translate, contextualize, and analyze Chinese digital policy documents, and discourse. Webster also writes the independent Transpacifica e-mail newsletter. He was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School, where he was responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center's U.S.–China Track 2 dialogues for five years, then led programming on cyberspace and high-tech issues. In the past, he wrote a CNET News blog on technology and society from Beijing, worked at the Center for American Progress, and taught East Asian politics at NYU's Center for Global Affairs. Graham holds a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University.