Every brief.
The full run, most recent first.
- § 07 · PIPL
When Is a Business Partner a 'Joint Handler'? A Shanghai Insurance-Policy Leak Works Through PIPL Article 20
A consumer bought insurance through a broker, on a platform company's website, from an insurer — and later found her full policy, personal details included, retrievable by searching her own phone number. The Shanghai judgment behind case (2024)沪01民终410号 had to decide which of the three companies were 'joint handlers' of her personal information under PIPL Article 20, and therefore jointly and severally liable. Writing on 数据何规, Lu Ying and Zhang Bingbin work through the allocation: the platform operating the website was the direct handler; the broker that steered the purchase through a site it presented as its own was a joint handler; the insurer — with an independent, contract-related purpose and no role in downstream processing decisions — was not. The article distills three identification factors (common purpose and conduct; pre-agreed division of roles as joint determination; the appearance presented to the user), separates joint processing from sharing and entrusted processing, and argues that PIPL Article 20(2) is an independent claim basis: a victim can sue all joint handlers for joint and several damages directly. For any broker/platform/underwriter or comparable multi-party data chain, this is the operative test.
- § 08 · CROSS-BORDER
First Filing Under Shanghai's Citywide Data-Export Negative List: Inditex's China Arm Drops from Security Assessment to Standard-Contract Filing
On June 26, 2026, ITX Asia Pacific Enterprise Management Co., Ltd. (爱特思亚太企业管理有限公司) — the Inditex group entity behind ZARA and Pull&Bear in China — received Shanghai's first data-export negative-list filing result notice (数据出境负面清单备案结果通知书) issued under the Shanghai Data-Export Negative List Administrative Measures, cleared jointly by the Shanghai CAC and the Shanghai Data Bureau after same-day district-level initial review at the Jing'an District Cross-Border Data Service Center. The practical effect: member-information exports that previously sat in Data Export Security Assessment territory now clear on a Personal Information Standard Contract filing. DCC reads the case as the first operational proof of Shanghai's two policy moves — negative-list eligibility extended citywide beyond Pudong-registered enterprises, and volume thresholds inside listed scenarios (retail member management) raised so that non-sensitive member data between 1 and 10 million individuals falls to the standard-contract/certification tier. For overseas retail groups running membership programs out of China, this is the template case.
- § 09 · ENFORCEMENT
From Naming to Takedown: Shanghai Pulls 46 Apps That Missed the Rectification Window
On June 24, 2026 the Shanghai Communications Administration (上海市通信管理局, the MIIT's directly-administered local communications authority) issued a notification ordering the takedown of 46 apps and SDKs that, after public naming and a rectification window, still had not fixed user-rights and personal-information violations. DCC reads it as the next rung on the enforcement ladder above the CAC's 30-app naming notification: same 2026 CAC + MIIT + MPS special campaign, but the local communications-administration tier converting an unrectified naming into an operative sanction — removal from distribution, with further measures flagged (suspension of access, administrative penalty, inclusion in the telecom-business bad-record list). The legal basis is PIPL, the Cybersecurity Law, the Telecom Regulations, and the Telecom and Internet User PI Protection Provisions. The 46-app list — transcribed here from the notice's attached image — is almost entirely Shanghai-registered long-tail O2O lifestyle apps (moving, housekeeping and cleaning, pet services, local travel agencies, community group-buy food, fitness and restaurants), and several operators appear with multiple apps taken down at once. DCC's read for overseas counsel: the provincial communications administrations are where a missed rectification window becomes a removed app, and the takedown tier sweeps the small-operator long tail, not just big nationals.
- § 10 · IMPORTANT-DATA
Are You Caught by the Annual Assessment? TRIMPS's Self-Identification Guide for 'Important-Data Handlers'
With the Network Data Security Risk Assessment Measures (Order No. 24) taking effect August 20, 2026, the annual risk-assessment duty stops being a principle and becomes a hard calendar event — but only for 'important-data handlers' (重要数据处理者). DCC's summary of a self-identification guide from the Data Security R&D Center of the Ministry of Public Security's Third Research Institute (公安部三所 / TRIMPS), author Lü Mingxuan, walks the threshold test the institution that helps draft the standards wants processors to run before the clock starts. There are three independent gates, any one of which puts you in: (1) you process data meeting the 'important data' definition under Article 62 of the Network Data Security Management Regulation; (2) the deeming rule — you process the personal information of more than 10 million people, which pulls you into the important-data duties of Regulation Arts. 30 and 32 regardless of whether you hold any 'important data'; or (3) your data sits on a regional, departmental, or sectoral important-data catalogue. Entrusted processors inherit the duty from an important-data-handler client; CIIO status and important-data-handler status are separate, intersecting tests; and identifying important data runs through GB/T 43697-2024 Appendix G's 18 factors plus the applicable catalogues. The guide then lays out the operating requirements once you are in: annual mandatory assessment plus trigger-based instant assessments, a stacked PIPIA for the 10-million-PI cohort, three-year report retention, and submission within 20 working days. DCC's read for overseas counsel: classification is the gate, the 10-million-PI deeming rule is the trap for consumer businesses with no 'important data' at all, and the self-ID needs to happen now.
- § 11 · DATA-ECONOMY
Li Yang: Why 'Data Rights-Confirmation' Is a Category Error — Dynamic Data Can't Be a Registration Object, and AUCL Article 13 Is the Better Path
DCC's summary of an opinion piece by Li Yang (李扬), professor at China University of Political Science and Law, arguing that the whole project of 'data rights-confirmation' (数据确权) — and the data-IP registration pilots run under it — rests on a category error. In Chinese IP law, 'confirmation' (确权) is the authoritative validation of an already-existing right, and it presupposes three things data lacks: a determinate object, defined rights content, and clear boundaries. Civil Code Art. 127 only defers the question; 'data IP' is a policy concept, not a legal one; and data is co-produced by many parties, so registration proves who submitted data, not who owns it. Li Yang's sharpest move is the dynamic-object problem: registration regimes (real estate, IP, equity) require a persistently stable object, but data's value lives in continuous updating, so the data at registration is never the data in dispute — and blockchain/hash/timestamp '存证' only fix a historical snapshot, never the living data stream, confusing proof-of-existence with object-identification. He concludes that registration's real functions are evidentiary and publicity/transaction-support — not rights-confirmation — and that data governance should move from rights-confirmation to interest-protection, from static-rights thinking to dynamic-competition thinking, protecting commercial-data interests under Article 13 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. DCC's read for overseas counsel, against the data-IP registration regime and the Beijing Internet Court's first AUCL Article 13 ruling.
- § 12 · ANTI-UNFAIR-COMPETITION
How the Beijing Internet Court Found a Platform 'Lawfully Held' Its Data Under the New AUCL Article 13 — and Where It Meets the 'Right to Hold Data'
The Beijing Internet Court's 30 April 2026 judgment — the first published application of the data clause (Article 13) of the 2025-revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, effective 15 October 2025 — turns on one threshold question: did the plaintiff platform 'lawfully hold' (合法持有) the scraped career data? DCC walks through exactly how the court got to 'yes', step by step: the data originated as personal information collected with user consent under the platform's Service Agreement and Privacy Policy (no unlawful processing on record); the operator's build-and-run investment aggregated scattered records into a dataset with standalone economic value; and that dataset is the foundational input for the platform's matching business and competitive advantage. From those three findings the court derives its operative definition — data lawfully collected/stored/used, formed through substantial investment, and capable of generating business benefit or competitive advantage — and holds that the defendant's crawler-and-resale scheme, circumventing login and access controls, was unfair competition (¥200,000 + ¥30,000-plus in costs). The brief then takes up the doctrinal question: does Article 13's 'lawfully held data' correspond to the 'right to hold data' (数据持有权) in the Data 20 Articles' three-rights framework? The answer is a functional yes — the court is enforcing the holding right's purely defensive content, exactly as Hong Yanqing's analysis predicted AUCL Article 13 would — but not a doctrinal one: it builds a competition-tort interest on investment and lawful sourcing, deliberately sidestepping any claim that data is a typed property right. DCC's case brief for overseas counsel, drawn against the earlier AUCL Article 2 general-clause data cases.