A proposed amendment to the Personal Data Protection Act recently passed its second reading in the Legislative Yuan. The most controversial aspect of the bill is a clause requiring the media and elected public officials to obtain the consent of individuals before publicizing any information about them. We urge the legislature to drop this bill before the third reading. If it is passed, it would be an unconstitutional law that could destroy Taiwan's hard-won freedom of speech and of the press. According to the bill, the media will not be allowed to seek by any means information about the private or social lives of individuals. This would leave the media with very little to report. Even worse, the bill does not specify whether the individuals it is seeking to protect are ordinary people or government officials. Under the controversial clause, all information about individuals is designated as private. However, it overlooks the fact that privacy is not an infinite or absolute right. It is evident that the architects of the bill have no idea that there are different rights pertaining to people's privacy and reputations. In media reporting, a person's privacy can only be violated if the information is accurate. Therefore, if all information about individuals is considered private and off limits to the media, there can be no accurate news stories, in which case all the media outlets will have to shut down. We could not believe our eyes when we saw the bill and we wished that our interpretation of it was incorrect. Can the Ministry of Justice and the Legislative Yuan please tell us if we have read the bill correctly? (April 22, 2010) 