Personal Information Protection Law, Arts. 13(6) and 27 (processing already-public personal information)

Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China, Arts. 13(6), 27

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In force since 1 November 2021.

A personal data rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 29 August 2026.

What it requires

Confine processing of personal information someone has already made public to a reasonable scope tied to your stated purpose.
Stop processing an individual's already-public personal information once they expressly decline, even though no prior consent was required.
Obtain separate consent before any use of already-public personal information that would have a significant impact on the individual, including most AI-training uses.

What this law does

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

Article 27 permits a personal information handler to process, within a reasonable scope, personal information an individual has disclosed themselves or that is otherwise lawfully public, unless the individual has expressly declined; processing that has a significant impact on the individual still needs separate consent.

Article 13(6) states the same ground as a general lawful basis for processing, functioning as China's analog to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Art. 6(1)(f), with its own reasonable-scope ceiling and opt-out rather than a legitimate-interest balancing test.

The 2023 Generative AI Interim Measures additionally require a lawful source for AI training data, which for personal information means satisfying this Article 27 basis; that measure's own robots.txt-related technical standard is not independently confirmed and is not recorded as its own instrument here.

When LexLint raises it

crawls_web
trains_models
processes_biometrics

Read the law

official text, Cyberspace Administration of China (cac.gov.cn)

Every line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.

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