Abstract
Since Personal Data Protection (PDP) Laws have been made effective, there has been a heated debate how to protect personal data as well as privacy. After 8 years experience in Japan, however, consensus has not been reached even as to the relationship between PDP and privacy protection. This uneasiness may result from the fact that the debate is exchanged mostly among law practitioners, which tends to be pragmatic rather than theoretical without proving the causality of privacy infringements. This paper tries to break through the present impasse by an academic re-analysis of the interests and methods of PDP from scratch. The author proposes several ideas, including unbundling of PDP from privacy protection,separate treatment of PDP for governmental data from PDP in general, and separation between syntactical and semantic understanding of information, as well as “liability against commitment as a corporate responsibility for information management”.
