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EU, Asia and the Pacific
This page
looks at legislation and developments in the EU and Asia.
the EU
During the 1970's Germany, France and much of Scandinavia enacted
comprehensive privacy legislation.
That development was reflected
in the suite of information privacy guidelines
adopted in 1980 by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) and in the 1980 Council of Europe Convention binding member countries to
create legislation establishing fair information practices. As John
Gaudin notes in his 1996 paper
The OECD Guidelines: Can They Survive Technological
Change? those regulatory frameworks predated the web.
In 1995 the European Union (EU) passed a Data
Protection Directive protecting personal information and harmonizing
privacy laws among its member states.
The Directive, now in effect
across the EU, has resulted in enactment of legislation among all EU
member states - and many trading partners - that enshrines a high level
of privacy protection and ensures that privacy is on the agenda in
government policy making.
The Directive requires that the laws of member states protect
personal information in both the private and public sectors. These laws
must contain provisions to block transfers of information to non-member
states that do not provide an "adequate" level of protection.
The EU, in contrast to Australia
and North America, has not relied on self-regulation of ISPs and
commercial or other sites: Brussels is moving to ensure compliance with
mandatory EU-wide principles and operational standards. It was the
subject of None of Your Business: World Data Flows, Electronic
Commerce and the European Privacy Directive (Washington, Brookings
98) by Peter Swire and Robert
Litan.
While overall responses within the EU
have been positive, some critics argue that the Directive and new
Directive-related national legislation is unduly bureaucratic or used to
suppress freedom of speech.
A recent example is Jacob Palme's overstated paper
on Freedom of Speech, the EU Data Protection Directive and the
Swedish Personal Data Act and his less temperate view
of Swedish regulation of the Web.
The essays by Mayer-Schoenberger
and Bennett in Technology & Privacy:
The New Landscape (Cambridge, MIT Press 97), edited by Marc
Rotenberg & Philip Agre, are of more value in assessing European
developments and their wider implications.
David Flaherty's Protecting Privacy in Surveillance
Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden,
France, Canada & the United States (Chapel Hill,
Uni of North Carolina Press 92) dates from the early 1980s
but remains of value.
At the national level Scandinavia, Germany and the
Netherlands continue to set the pace for the rest of the
EU.
Asia
and the Pacific
Non-European countries recently enacting private sector data
protection legislation consistent with the EU include Hong Kong, with a
statutory Privacy Commissioner (PCO)
under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance covering
the public and public sectors, and Taiwan.
Japan does not have a comprehensive national privacy/data
protection regime. The 1990 Protection of Computer
Processed Personal Data Act 1990 provides partial
regulation of some national government agencies and
provincial/municipal government agencies are in theory
covered by local privacy protection regulations.
New Zealand
Information about the New Zealand Privacy Act 1993,
one of the most comprehensive outside Europe, is available
at the NZ Privacy Commissioner's site.
In December 2000 the Statutes Amendment Bill was
introduced into Parliament. It will amend the Privacy Act
to secure a finding from the European Commission that New
Zealand provides an "adequate level of
protection" for the purposes of the EU Data
Protection Directive.
NZ currently does not restrict transborder movement of
personal data, a key feature of the EU privacy regime and
the basis of the Safe Harbour agreements with Canada and
the US. The NZ legislation will be amended to cover export
of personal information .
The
new bill will also remove existing restrictions on data
access or correction. At the moment, to request access to
data about yourself or require a correction, you must be a
New Zealand citizen, permanent resident, or in New Zealand
at the time of the request. The change will ensure that
Europeans and others have enforceable access and
correction rights, which can be exercised from outside the
country, when information is held or processed in New
Zealand.
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