China data privacy law limits big tech, but has few rights protections

Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Eurasia Group senior advisor and former MEP, discusses trends in big tech, privacy protection and cyberspace:

How does China's recently passed privacy law compare to other countries?

While China's new law is said to be similarly comprehensive as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and would indeed limit the decision-making power of its big tech companies. However, no law exists just on paper. There's always a context. And in the case of China, there are very few rights protections for people. While in the EU, fundamental rights protections were the main aim of the GDPR. For all geopolitical blocs with new data governance laws, China, India or the EU, we see a balancing act between national security arguments, rights protections, and economic development ambitions. But conspicuously absent from the list is the United States, which still does not have a federal data protection law.

With PayPal launching a cryptocurrency service in the UK, are digital currencies going mainstream now?

Whether or not cryptocurrencies go mainstream does not only depend on what you can buy with them today, but also on what regulators will be doing in the future. Only this week, the UK's FCA said it's not capable of supervising Binance. And I suspect that that dynamic, where a supervisory authority cannot perform its core tasks because of cryptocurrencies won't be accepted much longer.