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51 Hong Kong L.J. 917 (2021)
The Conceptual Barrier to Comparative Study and International Harmonisation of Data Protection Law

handle is hein.journals/honkon51 and id is 927 raw text is: THE CONCEPTUAL BARRIER TO COMPARATIVE STUDY AND INTERNATIONAL HARMONISATION OF DATA PROTECTION LAW Li Yang* and Min Yan** Although cross-border data flows are becoming increasingly important and prev- alent, there is not yet an international legal framework for data protection. The current lack of international legal harmonisation on data protection has created compliance burdens and risks for companies that rely on cross-border data to operate and may also erode the effectiveness of data protection systems that have been established in jurisdictions like the European Union. This article draws attention to a conceptual barrier to comparative study and international har- monisation of data protection law, namely the divergent conceptions of privacy across different societies and the intricate relations between data protection and privacy. Considering the complications and difficulties caused by the conceptual barrier, this article suggests that data protection and privacy are better understood as interrelated but distinct concepts for the sake of comparative legal research. Such a distinction not only provides the possibility for comparative researchers to construct a relatively ideologically and culturally neutral theoretical framework for understanding data protection law, thereby facilitating the widely desired international harmonisation of data protection standards, but also gives data protection legal discourse the flexibility to consider and to address broader values that are imperilled by ubiquitous data processing in today's information age. 1. Introduction In today's information age, cross-border data access, usage and exchange are essential to economic development.1 Almost every sec- Dr Li Yang is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, UK. Corresponding author. Dr Min Yan is an Associate Professor in Business Law and Director of BSc. Business with Law Programme at Queen Mary University of London, UK; he is also a Jin- shan Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Jiangsu University, China. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier version of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. Paul M Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, Transatlantic Data Privacy Law (2017) 106 Georgetown Law Joumal 115, 117. It is stated that international data transfers are the life blood of the digital economy.