Proskauer litigation associate Courtney Bowman and Jonathan Reardon, head of the Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia office of the Middle East-based firm Al Tamini & Co., recently co-authored an article published by Bloomberg about Saudi Arabia’s draft cloud computing regulations.  The article analyzes the draft regulations and their potential impact on…

At the end of last year, Qatar became the first Gulf state to enact a comprehensive privacy law. Until now, the many companies that market to consumers or have employees based in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have had to determine their local practices based on the various countries’ patchwork of sector-specific laws and regulations, as well as the differing privacy regimes in force in the region’s business-focused free zones. Now, at least in Qatar, the Personal Data Privacy Law ostensibly serves as a single law governing the collection and processing of data subjects’ personal information, and may serve as an exemplar for future GCC privacy laws.

The European Commission has released proposals for new legislation that seeks to create stronger privacy in electronic communications. The draft Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (the “Regulation”) is intended to replace the ePrivacy Directive (2002/58/EC) and will also bring the law in line with the new rules as set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”) as part of the process to modernize the data protection framework in the EU. As a regulation (rather than a directive) it will apply uniformly across the EU as there will be one single set of rules which will crease more legal certainty, save for certain prescribed areas where EU Member States can have their own rules.

As we previously reported, in December 2016 the New York Department of Financial Services (the “DFS”) announced that it was revising its proposed regulation that would require banks, insurance companies and other financial services institutions regulated by the DFS to adopt broad cybersecurity protections (the “Original Proposal”).

On December 28, 2016, the DFS released a revised version of the Original Proposal (the “Revised Proposal”) that incorporates greater flexibility with respect to requirements as well as delayed compliance deadlines. The Revised Proposal is subject to a final thirty-day comment period.

The CJEU (the European Union Court of Justice) has handed down a decision which makes clear that general and indiscriminate retention of electronic communications is unlawful. National legislation of each European Member State should ensure that mass surveillance only occurs where it is strictly necessary in order to combat serious crime as well as terrorism and meets other stringent requirements.

The references were made by the Swedish and UK courts and concerned the interpretation of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive (Directive 2002/58/EC, as amended by Directive 2009/136/EC) (the “Directive”), in light of the rights granted by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the “Charter”), particularly, the right to privacy (Article 7) and the right to protection of personal data (Article 8), and the decision of the CJEU in Digital Rights Ireland (C‑293/12 and C‑594/12).