Asia’s Response to Privacy Risks in the Wake of Covid-19

Webinar | June 23, 2020 | 9:00-10:00 am HKT

Reserve Your Spot Now

First Name

Last Name

Email Please enter a non-personal email address.

Company

Country

Comments

By submitting your details you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions, our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy. We won't share your personal info with any 3rd parties. Manage communications in our Preference Center.

Asia was the first region in the world to experience the outbreak of Covid-19, which happened at a time when many countries in the region were already working on substantial revisions to laws dealing with technology-related data-privacy concerns. The crisis put into stark relief the trade-offs between the risks to privacy and the risks to public health of using, or not using, technology in such public-health emergencies. The reactions of governments and the public to the use of technologies such as contact-tracing applications have been varied. South Korea and Australia provide case studies highlighting the challenges regulators face, especially as privacy issues have emerged in recent years as the subject of major policy developments in the US and Europe.

In this webinar, MLex data-privacy regulation experts Mike Swift in San Francisco, Choi Hyung-jo in Seoul and Laurel Henning in Sydney lay out the global and country-specific developments surrounding data-privacy protection in Asia, including:

The aggressive approach taken by the South Korean government during the Covid-19 outbreak, which was seen as a successful model for other countries, but which raised criticisms that the government’s collection and disclosure of information infringed people’s privacy rights.
While South Korean lawmakers early this year passed revisions to privacy laws that will change the landscape of data-protection enforcement in the country, the government is now in the process of revising the enforcement decrees of the laws. It remains to be seen if Covid-19 and how data was used during the crisis will have any impact on that.
When Australian measures were ramped up in mid-March to tackle the outbreak of Covid-19, the country’s privacy watchdog was already working on a new law for social-media platforms and preparing for a wider review of Australia’s Privacy Act. The peak of the virus outbreak in late March, as social-distancing measures were increased across the country, left the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner juggling its ongoing work with clarifying what protections exist in Australia for personal information in a health crisis.
Australia introduced its contact-tracing app in late April, granting the OAIC oversight of the app’s privacy protections. The strict privacy measures limiting the information the app gathers could lead to future debates over how much information is gathered under other Australian laws.