(Yicai Global) Dec. 3 -- A number of major Chinese cities are to stop the use of facial recognition and other forms of unauthorized collection of people’s personal identity as a new Civil Code comes into effect on Jan. 1.

Companies, government-sponsored institutions, industrial associations and chambers of commerce will not be allowed to collect biometric data from people such as an image of their face, a recording of their voice or fingerprints from next year, the city of Tianjin said on Dec. 1.

Property sales offices cannot collect scans of visitors’ faces without their permission, the Bureau of Housing Security and Property Administration in Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu province said a few days ago.

China will be adopting a new Civil Code next year that deems people’s names and biometric data to be private information. The act of collecting this data can only be done in legal and proper ways without the use of force, it says.

The country introduced a draft Personal Information Protection Law in October which states that individuals have the right to know about, decide, restrict or decline the processing of their personal information. Companies that break this law can face a penalty of up to CNY50 million (USD7.6 million) or 5 percent of their last year’s revenue.

The 5 percent penalty is quite high, and even higher than the ‘so-called strictest’ European Union’s fines for similar crimes, Zhou Hanhua, the deputy director of Institute of Law at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said previously. But whether it can be carried out or not depends on how the policy is implemented, he added.

Hangzhou in southeastern Zhejiang province is also trying to push through a new set of regulations that includes preventing property management firms from forcing house owners to hand over their fingerprints, facial images and other biometric data in order to use public facilities. Should the proposal become law, it will be China’s first legislation stipulating the norms for facial recognition in social communities.

Editor: Kim Taylor