Severe Leakages of Personal Data, No Results from Examination and Law Amendment.

The currently-in-effect Computer-Processed Personal Data Protection Law only includes detective agencies, hospitals, schools, telecommunication industries, financials, securities, insurance and public broadcast industries. The Law only protects personal data "processed by computers," and it is certainly not thorough enough in terms of protecting the privacy of personal data. To breach the gap that has lately resulted in severe leakage of personal data, the Ministry of Justice had decided at the beginning of this year to include futures and other three industries in regulation. It has also issued official statements to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and other relevant departments the other day to include department stores, wholesales and two other industries as well in order to ensure the security of personal data by expanding an applicable scope with administrative rules before amendment of the Law. However, the draft of amendment submitted by the Ministry of Justice last December was left aside in Administrative Yuan for more than six months and is still not passed, let alone to be submitted to Legislative Yuan to finish the process. Executive Yuan can hardly be exempted from this incident of legislative stagnancy. (2004.06)

CYJ/CHT