New privacy watchdog intends to follow predecessors’ steps

Yang Chongwei

Yang Chongwei, who was sworn in as new coordinator of the Office for Personal Data Protection (GPDP) yesterday, intends to build upon the “firm foundation left from the previous two coordinators.”

On the sidelines of a seminar on Clients Data Protection at the World Trade Center, held by the GPDP in collaboration with the Judiciary Police and Macau’s financial institutions, Yang said that his main goal is to continue to develop the activities launched by his predecessors.

These activities encompass two fields: the first being the coordination of juridical works and the second being the promotion of personal data protection to the general public.

In response to questions on the possibility of the GPDP proposing changes to the Personal Data Protection Law, which has been in force for over 10 years, Yang said that he believes the current law in force in Macau is largely up to date, and that minor changes may be put into effect after a review of the law.
“We know there was a rapid development [worldwide] regarding personal data protection, but we are closely monitoring the progress all over the world [and] most of the principles of our data protection law are still valid,” Yang said.

“We are also closely monitoring to see whether we need or not to make improvements [to our law], but I think in the short term we can [just] issue some guidelines to the data controllers so [they] can apply new changes [to the system],” he added.

Yang also dismissed the claim that the new facial recognition system installed in ATM machines for users of mainland bank cards could pose a new challenge for the Office. “The facial recognition technology is not very new. We have a lot of knowledge on that, [which] is why I can say there is not a very serious problem to Macau to implement this kind of new system,” he said.

“We will continue to monitor the development [and implementation] and whether there is any record of problems and whether data controllers can have more technology [available],” he assured, adding that the data protection authorities worldwide have been cooperating and sharing views on new developments of supervisory and identity verification technology.

Yang declined to confirm whether the “facial recognition data” would be handled by the financial institutions or by the Monetary Authority  of Macau.

In his opening speech for the seminar, Yang mentioned that credit card fraud is still an important matter in Macau as electronic payment methods are “not so widespread as they are in Hong Kong and other neighboring areas,” with credit cards being the most common payment method used both online and in physical stores.

He added that “data leakage and inefficient safeguarding of the cardholder’s personal data are the main risks to credit card use in terms of privacy breaching,” and that these problems were aggravated by criminals using this information to commit financial crimes.

Guest speakers later addressed additional problems on the use and handling of the credit cards by retail outlets as well as measures to prevent fraud.

Commenting on one of these interventions, Joseph Lee, representative of Evolution Security Systems Asia Limited, noted that “fear strikes consumption” – in other words, trusting the consumer to decide on the appropriate time to handle credit card bill payments can have a “great impact on trust” and that this trust can pay a decisive role in whether people decide to spend, especially for tourists.