Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

In 2019, a piece of news that shocked all travel enthusiasts was believed to be the "social media censorship" of US visas. Starting May 31, 2019, applicants will be required to provide usernames for all social media platforms they have used in the past five years when filling out the visa application form (DS-160). Including but not limited to Weibo, Douban, Qzone.

Although no one knows exactly how this policy is implemented, the thought of embassy staff seriously flipping through the speech of Secondary two in Qzone, or how many bad slices they have marked on Douban, such a scene makes people feel sick.

What's interesting about the information age is that almost all people's mental and physical activities leave traces on the server, and a whole film can be cobbled together from scattered data film, so that social media can take things for granted.

And when an individual becomes a city and a city becomes a state, it's not just embarrassing.

That is why the issue of cross-border data flows is getting more and more attention.

The cause of the trend

When we discuss that data is an asset, we also determine that data is a kind of property. It is divided into layers of ownership, from the main body of data to the enterprise, and then to the whole country. From society to the public, it is natural that data belonging to it will not be allowed to be transmitted to other countries through the cloud to be used. Furthermore, data on health, transportation, financial credit, maps and so on are sufficient to rise to the level of national security and be protected.

What arises at the historic moment is the "data localization" policy that we are most familiar with, which requires that data must be stored locally. At present, more than 60 countries in the world have made requirements for localized data storage, and different countries have different management models. For example, the European Union will emphasize the rights of the data subject and emphasize that the data subject should be informed of how the data is circulated and applied, while China emphasizes that it should be evaluated and audited before the data flow occurs to avoid non-compliant data flow.

Not only that, different countries also have different requirements for different types of data flow. Take our country as an example, for the data of the insurance industry, only a copy of the data (copy) is required to be stored in China, while the data can be stored, processed and accessed abroad. However, for credit information, it is required that "the collation, preservation and processing of information collected in China should be carried out in China." In terms of data types, in addition to personal information, the emphasis on industry data varies from country to country. For example, Australia focuses on protecting health data, while South Korea focuses on map data.

Such a protection policy certainly gives a lot of protection to data security, on the one hand, it ensures that a country's data assets will not be abused and keeps the bottom line of security; on the other hand, it also ensures the accountability of security issues through the localization of data. But from a commercial point of view, data can be valuable only if it is circulated and processed. Especially in today's widespread application of AI and cloud computing, the unsmooth flow of data will bring great obstacles to business development.

Like trade flows, in order to avoid this kind of trouble, many countries will develop similar "whitelist" mutual exemption principles to help data better cross-border application under the premise of compliance. These include the European Union's GDPR and the APEC Cross-Border Privacy Protection rules (CBPR), which the United States has been promoting. But at present, the popularization rate of these rule systems is not high. There are about a dozen countries and regions in the GDPR whitelist that perform well (excluding China), and only the United States and Japan actually operate CBPR.

The result of data blockage

Under the increasingly stringent requirements for data flow and the lack of a whitelist mechanism, how does it affect the overall business environment? From the point of view of those enterprises or organizations that oppose data localization protection, when data flow becomes "data blockage", the result is very frightening.

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) reports that half of global trade in services depends on access to cross-border data streams. Data localization often means that companies have to purchase infrastructure locally and hire relevant local staff, and some of the costs naturally fall on consumers. ITC even says this "data barrier" reduces U. S. gross domestic product by 0.1% to 0.3%, equivalent to a loss of $16.7 billion to $41 billion a year.

Not only that, Kaplan, a consultant from McKinsey, also pointed out that since the data privacy laws enacted by many countries are not yet mature, foreign investors will take into account the flexible risks of the bill when investing, feel "unable to understand" the text, and worry that they will violate relevant laws in the implementation of investment and business operations in the future, so foreign investment may also shrink in some countries.

In this way, it seems that the cross-border flow of data is related to the development of enterprises in large countries and the economy and people's livelihood of small countries. once data cannot flow freely across borders, large enterprises will suffer a lot of losses. many countries and regions will also suspend their development due to the lack of foreign investment.

Although these views are statements made by ITC and McKinsey from their respective positions, although they are not sure that they are 100% true, they also have certain reference points.

Such as the cost of data localization to the enterprise. One reason for opposition to India's push to localize data in the past year is that many Indian start-ups find it difficult to bear the cost of data localization. Not only data localization, after the introduction of the European Union's GDPR and other countries' data protection laws, enterprises in these countries also need to pay a certain amount of manpower and money to update legal affairs, privacy policies and so on, which also has a lot of hidden costs.

And the division of the nature of the data. In fact, some management will say that the reason why it is "incomprehensible" to the text of the regulation is that it is difficult to distinguish between the commercial and non-commercial nature of the data. From phone calls, messages, emails, to faces, voices, behavior tracks that can analyze a variety of results, and so on. Not all data is linked to business, but maybe all data can really find value. No wonder companies are more cautious in their understanding of the rules.

The opportunity of supervision to promote growth

Nowadays, the phenomenon of business first and supervision later is not uncommon, and even in many cases, the emergence of supervision will bring new opportunities to the development of the industry. This is especially true in the current chaotic and urgent situation in which data flows across borders.

It is impossible for data to remain in the server of one country forever, and the cross-border data that will be circulated is putting forward new requirements for the government and industry.

From an industrial point of view, no matter how sound policies and regulations are in the future, cross-border data flow must be relatively more difficult in the future than in the period of barbaric growth a few years ago. Therefore, it is a good solution to reduce unnecessary flow as much as possible, or even reduce the amount of data storage in order to reduce the cost of local storage. So in terms of AI, there will be more and more cloud computing, edge computing, and terminal computing. Similarly, cloud service providers not only provide infrastructure to customers, but also need to provide corresponding cloud + terminal + edge computing solutions. It is also likely that local cloud service vendors will gradually evolve into data hubs, providing reusable data pools and even models to different industries to reduce the need for data.

In fact, this truth is the same as the development of any industry, if the transportation cost is too high, "local processing" and "front shop and back factory" mode will become more and more popular.

But in addition to the industry itself, more responsibilities and variables lie with the government that has the power of regulation. Apart from formulating regulatory rules as fully as possible, the Government also has the responsibility to take into account the costs of supervision. Especially for small and micro enterprises, should they also provide data storage infrastructure support when giving them policy support? And encourage the development of local data storage devices, cloud services, etc., to ensure that under the premise of less external competition, these enterprises still maintain innovative enthusiasm and ensure the quality of services.

I believe no one wants to see that while data is localized, providers of localized services lose momentum because of reduced competition.

Concluding remarks

Finally, we can open our mind again-- there are free ports and bonded areas in the physical industry, and preferential policies on taxes and fees are given in certain areas, allowing the assembly, processing, re-export of foreign goods, and so on, so as to attract foreign investment and develop industries such as industry, warehousing, trade and so on. So will there be a similar "data free port" in the future?

Like foreign trade, data mining and utilization also requires a lot of infrastructure, such as storage hardware, computing power, transmission speed and so on, especially with the support of talent technology. If the cross-border flow of data will become more difficult in the future, will some countries and regions win the trust of the world with excellent infrastructure and complete policies and become the center of data processing and circulation? As Singapore put forward a few years ago, the vision of building a world data management center, hoping to attract technology companies to Singapore to develop content and services.

What's more, unlike warehousing and shipping, big data's processing and storage belong to the high-tech industry. Attract these industries to take root in a city, in the long run, such a model will create the glory of a city or even a country.

Perhaps the undercurrent brought about by the cross-border flow of data will be more turbulent than we thought.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.