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Media Responses

Response to Media Enquiry or Report

Date: 30 March 2021

Response to media enquiry on Companies Register's commencement of the new inspection regime

Thank you very much for your enquiry. Our response to your enquiry is as follows:
 
Enquiry
 
“I am writing to ask if the PCPD has any comment to make around the privacy concerns in the Companies Register.

Internationally, there has been a move to making who owns companies more transparent, largely believing that any secrecy afforded to the owners of companies could help hide or disguise corporate entities being used to facilitate, or move funds linked to, financial crimes.

It would be great to get the PCPD’s thoughts on this proposal.”

Answer:
  • Since around mid-2019, personal data has been weaponised in Hong Kong and doxxing behaviour has attracted increasing public concern. From June 2019 up to the end of 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong (PCPD), handled over 5,400 doxxing-related cases, including complaints received and cases uncovered by the PCPD’s proactive surveillance.
     
  • Against this background, the PCPD welcomes measures proposed for strengthening the protection of personal data contained in a public register.
     
  • Back in July 2015, the PCPD published a report on the “Survey of Public Registers Maintained by Government and Public Bodies”. Among others, the PCPD recommended that when providing personal data of a sensitive nature (such as identification documents and residential addresses), operators of registers should explore less privacy-intrusive means of the disclosure of the data, for example, by providing partial, instead of full, identification document numbers and by providing correspondence addresses, instead of residential addresses.
     
  • The PCPD believes that the Government will strike a balance between the protection of personal data privacy and the provision of public search service in relation to the public register as mentioned in your enquiry.
     
  • Meanwhile, the PCPD is working with the Government on formulating the concrete proposals to amend the local privacy law to combat doxxing.