The acceleration of global digital transformation and the widespread application of emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing have contributed to the exponential growth in the scale of data exchange between countries. This study analyzes the influence mechanism of the level of cross-border data flow on the effect of legal regulation on personal information protection by means of a multiple linear regression model. Based on the panel data of 12 exporting countries and 30 importing countries from 2016-2024, a regression model containing control variables such as the level of economic development, geographic distance, population size, the level of Internet infrastructure development, and the level of foreign direct investment was constructed. The results show that every 1 percentage point increase in the level of cross-border data flow enhances the legal regulation effect of personal information protection by 0.792 percentage points, and the model coefficient of determination improves from 0.603 to 0.914. The endogeneity test shows that every 1% increase in the level of cross-border data flow leads to a 7.9% increase in the legal regulation effect of personal information protection under the treatment of the instrumental variable method. In the robustness test, the impact coefficient of adding the personal information protection awareness variable is 0.176 and significant at the 1% level. The study finds that the level of cross-border data flow promotes the legal regulation effect of personal information protection by influencing the level of national economic development and infrastructure construction, which provides empirical support for improving cross-border data governance.
