Logic and Path of Adjusting the Sale of Personal Information by Bankruptcy Law: Taking American Law as the Breakthrough Point

With the development of digital economy, more and more enterprises rely on the electronic storage, trans-mission and management of personally identifiable information and use it as a special resource that can be marketed internally or sold to other enterprises. Personally identifiable information gradually has a quantifiable value and its value is soon comparable to that of traditional financial assets. As a result, while maintaining consumers' personally identifiable information, many enterprises are also sharing or selling information of consumers' preferences. This is especially true when enterprises are facing financial difficulties and entering bankruptcy proceedings. In order to strengthen the protection of personal information, the United States has applied a personal information protection model with corporate privacy policies as the core in bankruptcy proceedings and incorporated the sale of personal information into the scope of its bankruptcy law. However, due to the late enactment of the law in China, under the existing legal logic framework, the sale of personal information by enterprises in bankruptcy proceedings is only settled with the current laws, mainly including the "Civil Code of the People's Republic of China" and the "Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China" and this cannot effectively solve many problems in theory and practice. At present, China's bankruptcy law is at the critical period of revision and it is essential to construct and improve the legal path to handle Chinese enterprises' selling of personal information in bankruptcy proceedings with reference to American law, thereby enriching the theory of bankruptcy law.