Didi’s data remains central to enforcement in China; and the one-year anniversary of Schrems II

MLex Market Insight

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4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

The sudden and unprecedented enforcement action targeting China’s largest ride-hailing company Didi appears to have opened yet another chapter in Beijing’s crackdown on the country’s tech giants. The order for Didi to remove a suite of apps just days after the company’s IPO in the US may have been driven by security and commercial concerns over foreign access to large swathes of data generated by the service’s users. Also on today’s podcast, we mark the first-year anniversary of the “Schrems II” court ruling, which nullified the so-called Privacy Shield that had allowed for data transfers to take place between the European Union and the United States. The decision brought deep uncertainty to transatlantic business dealings, yet a solution to the problem remains elusive, complicated by the absence of a federal privacy legislation in the US.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello there, welcome back. It's great to be with you again. I'm James Panicki. This is
0:14.6	Emlex's weekly podcast covering the top regulatory stories of the moment. And today we mark the first anniversary of Shrems 2.
0:23.2	That's the decision by the European Court of Justice that upended the so-called privacy shield
0:28.5	which allowed transfers of data between the EU and the US. It was a monumental decision
0:34.8	with wide-ranging implications for the entire world, and we'll get our
0:39.4	reporters to walk us through those implications in just over 10 minutes' time. But first up,
0:44.8	China's tech crackdown. This is arguably the most significant story that we've been covering
0:50.1	all year, marking a regulatory pivot that's breathtaking in its scope. And whereas the regulatory
0:57.1	action targeting, say, Ali Baba, centred on antitrust concerns, the most recent enforcement
1:03.5	action against ride-hailing company Diddy appears to be focused on data. Yes, that's right. It's a
1:09.8	data protection issue combined with old-school
1:12.7	geopolitics, and it's all pointing to a revolution in the way China's homegrown big tech industry
1:18.9	will need to do business in future. Today we'll take a look at this issue from all sides,
1:24.7	starting from data protection, and our Hong Kong-based correspondent,
1:29.1	Shu Wan, has filed a fascinating piece of analysis for us, and she joins me right now.
1:35.4	So, Xu Wan, first off, tell me something about Didi the company. What do we need to know?
1:40.7	Hi, James. Didi Chusing is a Chinese right-hailing app company, more often known as
1:49.9	D-D. So it is essentially the Chinese version of Uber. In 2016, it actually acquired the Chinese
1:58.4	business of Uber. So it is right now the biggest right-hailing app in China.
2:06.1	Okay, and tell me something about how it came under the spotlight and what has happened over the
2:11.0	past few weeks. Sure. So on the last day of June, it went public in the U.S., which was an IPO that was widely expected this year.
2:23.5	And then two days later, on July 2nd, a Friday night, a Chinese regulator called the Cyberspace Administration,
	...

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