The Global Changing Privacy Landscape

The pace of change in uses and regulation of personal information has continued to accelerate around the globe. This brief review looks at changes over the past 12 months in the regulation of handling of personal information through new or amended privacy law. Our observations are that there is an increasing recognition of privacy in the regulatory environment. Indeed, countries that have had privacy law for some time are updating their laws while countries that had not previously considered privacy law now have it in place. Australia, Korea and the EU are examples of the former described in this paper; Singapore, the Philippines and China are examples of the latter.