Both GDPR and PIPL require a lawful basis for processing personal data, but their approaches diverge in practice. GDPR offers six lawful bases, including legitimate interest, which is widely used by businesses to process data without consent. PIPL lists similar grounds, but legitimate interest is narrowly scoped and rarely relied upon; explicit, separate consent remains the dominant mechanism, especially for sensitive data and cross-border transfers.
PIPL also requires separate consent for each distinct purpose, whereas GDPR allows bundled consent in some contexts. These differences mean that a GDPR-compliant consent flow may not satisfy PIPL without additional granularity.
GDPR permits international transfers through adequacy decisions, standard contractual clauses (SCCs), binding corporate rules, or approved codes of conduct. PIPL offers three mechanisms: CAC security assessment (mandatory above certain thresholds), standard contracts filed with the CAC, or personal-information protection certification.
Unlike GDPR, PIPL mandates data localisation for critical information infrastructure operators and requires a local representative for foreign controllers. The practical effect is that transferring personal data out of China is more procedurally intensive than transferring data out of the EU.
Organisations operating in both the EU and China need a consent management platform that adapts to each regime’s requirements. Seers enables geo-targeted consent banners that display GDPR-compliant options to European visitors and PIPL-compliant, purpose-separated consent flows to Chinese visitors.
Consent records are stored with jurisdiction-specific metadata, making audits straightforward. By integrating with Google Consent Mode v2, Seers ensures that tag behaviour adjusts automatically based on the consent status recorded for each user, regardless of which regulatory framework applies.
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