ASEAN's Two Speed Data Privacy Laws: Some Race Ahead
(2017) 147 Privacy Laws & Business International Report 25-28
7 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2017 Last revised: 13 Jul 2018
Date Written: May 26, 2017
Abstract
The ten ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) member states include some of the world’s most rapidly-developing economies, and have high ambitions for economic integration. The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), established in 2015, has as one of its e-commerce objectives the development in 2016-2025 of a ‘coherent and comprehensive framework for personal data protection’, including ‘Regional Data Protection and Privacy Principles’.
By 2014 five of the ten member states had enacted data privacy laws: Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia and Vietnam. Since then, there have been significant developments in all five countries, including strong enforcement actions in both Singapore and the Philippines in the past year, and new legislation in Indonesia and Vietnam. However, there have been few developments since 2014 in the other five members (Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand), so that overall, there is limited progress toward the ‘coherence’ which is the aim of the AEC.
This article surveys developments in all these countries from mid-2014 to mid-2017.
Keywords: ASEAN, privacy, data protection, Asia
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