The Cyberspace Administration of China issued the "Regulations on the Protection of Personal Information of Large-scale Internet Platforms" for public comments, and AI companies and mobile phone manufacturers may be fully included in the regulation. On November 22, the Cyberspace Administration and the Ministry of Public Security issued a draft for public comments, which categorizes platforms with "more than 50 million registered users or more than 10 million monthly active users" and those involving national economy and people's livelihood as regulated entities. Different from previous regulations that focused on e-commerce and social platforms, this time, under the overlapping factors of user scale, business complexity, and data influence, AI companies like DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax, which were previously considered as model research and development companies, and terminal manufacturers like OPPO, vivo, Honor, and other terminal ecosystem manufacturers will be included in the "large-scale network platform directory". The new regulations require large platforms to open "network data facilities, systems, and operation log recording permissions" to third-party organizations, with these organizations reporting to the Cyberspace Administration and the Ministry of Public Security, forming a joint regulatory network between government departments and third-party organizations.
However, similar to previous regulations, the new regulations, named as the Protection of Personal Information, only detail the obligations that platforms need to comply with, without specifying the legal boundaries for administrative agencies to access user information. There is no clause restricting the "abuse of access rights by government agencies", no guarantee of the right to be informed when a user's personal information is accessed, and the regulatory framework on the power side still has gaps. The more detailed the regulation, the less restricted the power.
