Privacy and Personal Data Protection Law in Asia

This book explores how different Asian jurisdictions regulate the transfer and protection of personal data, with a view to developing the applicable private international law rules in Asia.

Covering 16 Asian jurisdictions – representing differing stages in the development of data protection regulatory systems – this book offers an in-depth, cross-jurisdictional commentary on the developing world of Asian privacy and personal data protection, with a special focus on private international law issues.
It brings together an international team of contributors who reflect on the framework of data privacy and protection laws in their respective regions. Topics discussed range from the extent to which such laws may have extraterritorial effect or may conflict with the laws of other states, to shortcomings of existing systems and their potential for improvement.

More than a valuable contribution to comparative private conflict of laws literature from an Asian perspective, the book also considers possible future trajectories for existing laws. It covers the extent to which Asian regimes will inevitably need to integrate with ever-evolving privacy and personal data protection initiatives in the EU, the USA and China. It also assesses the extent to which existing regimes are sufficiently robust to handle the challenges of future technical developments in data collection and data transfer across borders, especially in relation to the activities of giant corporations such as Meta (Facebook), Google, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent.

The result is a wide-ranging and forward-thinking resource, which provides practitioners and researchers with an account of data privacy law and personal data protection laws in Asia and their cross-border implications – as those regulations are now and as they might be in the future.