Felix Ng was a speaker in the Transnational Crime Conference in Lisbon, Portugal

Our partner Felix Ng was a speaker at the 20th Transnational Crime Conference of the International Bar Association held in Lisbon, Portugal. He gave a presentation on the impact of EU General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation 2016/679; “GDPR”) and EU Directive 2016/680 on Asia-Pacific countries. About 200 international criminal practitioners attended the session.

To start off the discussion, Felix gave a comparative analysis on the data privacy regimes in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Hong Kong. He then discussed one remarkable feature of the GDPR – extra-territorial application. The GDPR extends its application to non-EU data users so long as the data processing activities in question involve (i) offering of goods & services to EU data subjects; or (ii) monitoring of behaviour of EU data subjects.

 

Felix took the view that the extra-territorial application of GDPR would have significant impact on business enterprises in Asia-Pacific countries, particularly those concerning e-commerce, search engines, internet or cloud service providers, and entities that provide goods and services to EU customers.

 

With the GDPR coming into operation in May 2018, Felix was concerned that Asian business enterprises may not have sufficient time to adapt their data privacy mechanisms to comply with the GDPR provisions.

 

For details of the Conference program, please click here

For a copy of the Powerpoint, please click here