The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ("MIIT") has recently issued the Guiding Opinions on the Building of Work Style and the Rectification of Wrongdoings within the Information Communication Industry in 2019 (the "Opinions").
The Opinions call for efforts to strengthen the building of work style within the industry, reinforce cybersecurity regulation, enhance the service capacity and the level of services and focus on the resolution of hotspot issues arousing public concerns, including crank calls, unregulated tariff marketing campaigns and calculation and charge of tariffs, illegal collection and use of personal information, and fraudulent communication information, in order to practically safeguard lawful rights and interests of users. In addition, the Opinions propose further regulating the market order and deepening the standard processing of applications for "switching carriers while keeping phone numbers unchanged", and place a ban on the unapproved introduction of extra business processing conditions, any intentionally placed barriers, and the vicious competition by taking advantage of the policy that allows users to "keep their phone numbers unchanged while switching carriers". Furthermore, it is made clear in the Opinions that efforts will be stepped up to fulfill the protection of users' personal information and the network data security. Also, carriers are required to clearly indicate why, how and to what extent they will collect and use the information and are prohibited from collecting any personal information irrelevant to the services they deliver, doing their best to effectively safeguard users' right to know and right to choose.