A woman buys a secondhand electric car, pairs her phone, and finds the previous owner's home address still pinned in the navigation history and his voice profile still enrolled in the cabin assistant. Nobody wiped it. In China, that small everyday failure is on its way to becoming a legal question rather than a courtesy.
Key takeaways
- On 20 October 2026, the equipment industry division (装备工业一司) of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published five draft mandatory national standards (强制性国家标准) for public comment; feedback closes 19 December 2026.
- The headline item, 《汽车数据安全要求》, would replace GB/T 44464—2024《汽车数据通用要求》, moving car data rules from 推荐性 (voluntary) to 强制性 (mandatory).
- Scope covers M class and N class vehicles (M类、N类车辆); vehicles modified from an already type-approved second-class chassis are excluded.
- Three clauses bite hardest: default no collection of personal information (个人信息), an anonymisation detection rate of at least 90% for faces and plates captured outside the car, and a flat ban on a vehicle sending data directly overseas.
- Status: 征求意见稿 (draft for comment). Nothing has been adopted, no standard number is issued, no effective date exists.
What was actually published
The notice lists five drafts released together: 《汽车数据安全要求》, 《汽车及挂车外部照明和光信号装置的安装要求》, 《车载无线广播接收系统》, 《智能网联汽车 泊车组合驾驶辅助系统安全要求》, and 《智能网联汽车 自动泊车系统安全要求》. All five are 强制性国家标准 drafts. Comments go to MIIT's equipment industry division by post or by email (vehicle@miit.gov.cn) before 19 December 2026, with individuals asked to sign their name and organisations asked to stamp their submission.
Only the first of the five is a data document, but it is the one that reaches furthest into product design. Its drafting note is dated 10 September 2026 and proposes that the existing GB/T 44464—2024 be abolished outright once the new version takes over. The draft also proposes notifying the World Trade Organization, which is standard practice for a mandatory standard that touches trade.
From GB/T to GB: why one letter matters
China's Standardization Law splits national standards into two kinds. A 推荐性国家标准 (GB/T) is a recommended benchmark: useful, quotable in contracts, but not a legal gate. A 强制性国家标准 (GB) is a bottom line — products that fail it cannot lawfully be made or sold.
The letters matter more here because of what the standard is attached to. The drafting note states plainly that MIIT is responsible for vehicle type approval (型式批准), and that products failing a mandatory standard will not be entered into the product announcement catalogue (公告目录) that a manufacturer needs before producing or selling a road vehicle. Data security would move from something audited after an incident to something checked before a model is allowed on sale.
The draft's own implementation chapter sets the timing: newly type-approved models would comply from the implementation date, while already-approved models would get a 13-month grace period running from that date. The implementation date itself is not fixed, because the document has not been issued.
The three clauses that change engineering
Default off. Clause 6.3.1 says a vehicle must be set, by default, to a state of not collecting personal information, unless the user actively configures it or an exception applies. The draft also refuses to let a bundled, pre-ticked consent box count as compliance, and it bars the car from refusing basic functions — starting, braking, steering, air conditioning, lights, wipers, seat adjustment and similar — because a user declined a data permission.
Anonymisation you can measure. Clause 6.6.2 sets numeric thresholds. Faces must be anonymised when the bounding box is at least 28 pixels on its shorter side and more than 50% visible with eyes, nose or mouth identifiable; plates when the box is at least 16 pixels and digits are readable. The anonymisation detection rate (检出率) for both must be greater than or equal to 90%, and processed targets must not be re-identifiable. This turns a vague "please blur faces" obligation into a testable figure.
No direct outbound flow. Clause 6.8 is one sentence: a vehicle shall not transmit data directly outside China. Browsing a foreign website, messaging abroad, or a user's own third-party apps are excluded. For global manufacturers this is the sharpest clause in the draft, because it constrains architecture rather than paperwork.
Honest limitations
This is a draft. Clause numbers, thresholds and even the anonymisation pixel thresholds could change before anything is issued, and the 13-month transition applies only if the final text keeps it. I have not seen a published implementation date in an official document; dates circulating in commentaries are not from MIIT and are not used here. The five standards sit at different points in the same process, so treating all of them as equally close to adoption would be wrong. This piece also does not assess how the data-export ban interacts with the separate cross-border data transfer mechanisms run by the cyberspace regulator — that is a distinct regime with its own procedures. Finally, most of my reading comes from the draft text and its drafting note; I have not spoken to manufacturers about how they would meet the 90% detection rate in practice, so the compliance cost implied here is an inference, not a measurement.
What readers can do now
- Anyone with a stake in a specific clause — suppliers, fleet operators, consumer groups — can file a written comment to MIIT before 19 December 2026. Drafts really do change at this stage, and the anonymisation thresholds are the kind of number that gets argued over.
- If you buy or sell used cars, ask the dealer to demonstrate the in-car account deletion function rather than accepting a promise that data was cleared remotely. The draft requires a user-accessible deletion path precisely because the current situation is unreliable.
- Fleet and engineering teams can start the work that will be required regardless of the final wording: an inventory of what each function collects, where it is stored, and which channels send anything overseas.
The direction behind the draft
The pattern across recent Chinese AI and vehicle rules is consistent: voluntary guidance first, quantitative mandatory requirements second, and enforcement pushed upstream to an approval gate. Passenger privacy is the stated consumer benefit, but the mechanism is industrial — a data-security requirement that a car cannot be sold without.
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), attaching data requirements to type approval shifts compliance from a post-incident audit to a precondition of market entry, which is a different kind of pressure on engineering teams entirely.
Whether the 90% detection rate survives comment is an open question. That a car's data behaviour would become a condition of being allowed on the road is not.