Hello, I'm David Plott, Emlex's managing editor for Asia, coming to you today from our Bureau here in Hong Kong. Welcome to Emlex on the web.

Lately it's been hard to avoid news about the internet, or more specifically about internet companies,

and the way they've been scooping up data on their users and then selling it on,

and sometimes sending it straight into the hands of certain businesses

with pretty questionable ethics.

The case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica has dominated the front pages and the airwaves

for the past month now.

But not in China.

That's one of the only places where this massive data breach hasn't been front and center of the news agenda.

But that doesn't mean it's gone unnoticed in Beijing. China's Internet may be fenced in behind the great firewall,

but regulators in the country have been quietly developing rules and protections designed

to prevent exactly the kind of indiscriminate vacuuming up of data that's caused the recent outrage

in Western countries. Personal information is precious and private, and even Beijing seems

to have recognized that in its new drive to set

standards for how data is handled. Here with me now to talk about China's take on data protection

in the Internet sector is Mlex correspondent Shuan. Welcome to this podcast, Shouan.

Thanks, David. We've heard so much about Facebook in recent weeks.

Now, Facebook, as you know, is banned in China, but China has a huge number of its own social

media platforms and apps that collect personal data. And it has more people online than in the other country. What's the government doing to

stop all that data from being misused?

Data protection is one of the major issues covered by China's cybersecurity law. That law came

into force just under a year ago. Since then, Chinese regulators have been working on standards to tell

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