Category Archives: Personal Information

Character.AI Goes Bankrupt: Can Users’ Private Chat Records Be Auctioned?

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(By You Yunting) Recently, news that Character.AI (“Character”), a U.S. AI AI companion company, has entered bankrupt and that its data assets may be sold out at auction has drawn wide attention. What is striking, however, is not the bankruptcy but the proposed sale itself. Character’s principal business is an AI character-based companion chat platform, and its platform data includes a large volume of emotional chat records between users and AI—content that is not only private but often pornographic or violent, and at times revealing the darker side of human nature. Yet prospective buyers in the United States are seeking to acquire them. This article examines the legal issues raised by auctioning such records.

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Why Zhipu’s User Data Practices Deserve a Regulatory Look？

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(By You Yunting) According to a recent report by China Newsweek, ZCode, an AI coding tool developed by Zhipu AI, a publicly listed company, has been found to secretly package, encrypt, and upload to the cloud, by default, the entire workspace data of logged-in users. On September 18, Zhipu issued an apology in its official user community. A source interviewed by the report, however, said the data was in fact uploaded to an Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket in Hong Kong[i]. In my view, this incident may involve large-scale outbound transfer of data, and the possibility that it includes “important data” cannot be ruled out. Regulators therefore have cause to investigate, and Zhipu is also under a legal duty to notify users and to report to the competent authorities.

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Where Is the Legal Boundary of AI Skill Distillation?

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(By You Yunting) Imagine this scenario: you have worked at a company for five years, and your daily emails, meeting minutes, and handled contracts are all stored on the company’s servers. One day, you are called in for a talk and HR informs you that your position is redundant. Your replacement is a “Skill file” distilled from your five years of work records—an AI system that can perform your job duties using this file. Today, we will discuss whether such skill distillation raises legal issues.

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How Difficult is it for Heygen AI Services that Make Guo Degang Tell English Jokes to Land in China?

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(By You Yunting) Recently, many videos of celebrities speaking foreign languages have appeared on the Internet, such as Guo Degang and Zhao Benshan telling English jokes, and Taylor Swift and Donald Trump speaking Chinese, which is actually supported by using AI services of Heygen. I visited Heygen’s website and found that it was not available to domestic users with no WeChat and Alipay in the service payment channel, but in fact Heygen’s founders are two Chinese, both graduating from Tongji University. Today I would like to discuss the formalities Heygen needs to go through in order to have its AI services land in China.

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Outbound Personal Information Transfer Is Better Regulated – A Brief Analysis of Regulations on Standard Contract for Cross-Border Transfer of Personal Information (Exposure) and Security Certification Procedures for Cross-Border Handling Activities of Personal Information

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(By Wang Hongliang) Many businesses are perplexed by the practical problem about outbound personal information transfer compliance, especially for foreign-inveested businesses that need to provide personal information abroad in many scenarios, for example when they have to provide personal information to their headquarters or affiliates.

Article 38[1] of the Personal Information Protection Law provides that in addition to other premises, security assessment, personal information protection certification and standard contract are approaches to outbound personal information transfer compliance. According to Article 4[2] of the Measures for Data Outbound Transfer Security Assessment (Exposure), the security assessment mainly applies to the situations when personal information is collected or generated by critical information infrastructure operators, personal information handlers processing personal information of one million people or more transfer personal information abroad or personal information of over 100 thousand people or sensitive personal information of over 10 thousand people is cumulatively transferred abroad.

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