U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at protecting Americans’ personal data from foreign adversaries.

The order aims to block bulk transfers of data such as geolocation, biometric, health and financial information to “relevant countries.”

Specific countries cited by Biden administration officials as worrisome include China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

“Bad actors could use this data to track Americans, including members of the military, into their personal lives and pass the data to other data brokers and foreign intelligence agencies,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet announcing the move. “This data can lead to intrusive surveillance, fraud, extortion and other privacy violations.”

Emily Benson, director of the Trade and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA’s Mandarin service that the executive order is one of the most far-reaching attempts by the U.S. government to create a privacy framework.

Benson said the difference between the U.S. approach to data governance and that of other allies, such as the European Union, is that the U.S. approach is based on a national security paradigm, so executive orders are national security tools rather than privacy mechanisms.

Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an associate professor of international studies at Indiana University Bloomington, told VOA’s Mandarin service that there are many concerns about the flow of data to potential adversaries, including concerns about the U.S. government or the U.S. Information about military personnel, or the data may be used for surveillance purposes.

Bauerle Danzman said the concerns also related to the way large amounts of data could be used to track dissidents in diaspora communities, including for the purpose of silencing or intimidating those communities.

Hannah Kelley, a fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told VOA Mandarin that the executive order is the most impactful recent advance in data protection.

Kelly said that while the debate over domestic data privacy legislation continues, there is more consensus on protecting U.S. data abroad.

She said there must be an assumption that the countries involved will find a way to obtain existing sensitive, personal and government information, and the United States must make it as difficult as possible for those countries to do that.

Paul Triolo, head of technology policy at the Albright Stonebridge Group, told VOA Chinese that the U.S. and other governments are “definitely trying to do the same with China. matter, leveraging publicly and covertly collected data sources.”

Triolo also noted potential issues with data limitations.

“The danger of controlling healthcare and genomic data too tightly is that citizens in China and the United States could lose out on the healthcare advances that come from large-scale data analysis under conditions of carefully managed data privacy and auditing, which could bring Breakthroughs are in therapeutics, leveraging various artificial intelligence algorithms such as making connections and extracting new insights from clinical data,” Triolo said.

Information for this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters