Written by a renowned expert on data protection law, this work examines the history, policies, and future of transborder data flow regulation, and is the only text to provide a detailed legal analysis of its global implications.

An exploration of the current state of global trade law in the era of Big Data and AI. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The historic European Union Directive on Data Protection will take effect in October 1998. A key provision will prohibit transfer of personal information from Europe to other countries if they lack “adequate” protection of privacy. If enforced as written, the Directive could create enormous obstacles to commerce between Europe and other countries, such as the United States, that do not have comprehensive privacy statutes. In this book, Peter Swire and Robert Litan provide the first detailed analysis of the sector-by-sector effects of the Directive. They examine such topics as the text of the Directive, the tension between privacy laws and modern information technologies, issues affecting a wide range of businesses and other organizations, effects on the financial services sector, and effects on other prominent sectors with large transborder data flows. In light of the many and significant effects of the Directive as written, the book concludes with detailed policy recommendations on how to avoid a coming trade war with Europe. The book will be of interest to the wide range of individuals and organizations affected by the important new European privacy laws. More generally, the privacy clash discussed in the book will prove a major precedent for how electronic commerce and world data flows will be governed in the Internet Age.

Countries are increasingly introducing data localization laws, threatening digital globalization and inhibiting cloud computing adoption despite its acknowledged benefits. This multi-disciplinary book analyzes the EU restriction (including the Privacy Shield and General Data Protection Regulation) through a cloud computing lens, covering historical objectives and practical problems, showing why the focus should move from physical data location to effective jurisdiction over those controlling access to intelligible data, and control of access to data through security.

This book focuses on the PRC’s cross-border data transfer legislation in recent years, as well as the implications for international trade law. The book addresses the convergence of industries and technologies notably caused by digitization; the issue of conflicts between goods and services; and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as well as the difficulty of classifying service sectors under WTO members’ commitments. The book also examines the FTAs that entered into force after 2012 that regulate digital trade beyond the venue of the WTO and analyzes their rules of relevance for cross-border data flows and international trade. It asks whether and how these FTAs have deliberately reacted to the increasing importance of data flows as well as to the trouble of governing them in the context of global governance

This book was published in 2003.This book offers a broad and incisive analysis of the governance of privacy protection with regard to personal information in contemporary advanced industrial states. Based on research across many countries, it discusses the goals of privacy protection policy and the changing discourse surrounding the privacy issue, concerning risk, trust and social values. It analyzes at length the contemporary policy instruments that together comprise the inventory of possible solutions to the problem of privacy protection. It argues that privacy protection depends upon an integration of these instruments, but that any country's efforts are inescapably linked with the actions of others that operate outside its borders. The book concludes that, in a ’globalizing’ world, this regulatory interdependence could lead either to a search for the highest possible standard of privacy protection, or to competitive deregulation, or to a more complex outcome reflecting the nature of the issue and its policy responses.

The new edition of this acclaimed book has been expanded to give a fully updated overview of European data protection law, with a focus on data protection compliance issues affecting companies, and incorporating the important legal developments which have taken place since the last edition was published. These include the first three cases of the European Court of Justice interpreting the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46); accession of new Member States to the EU; the new Data Retention Directive; new developments on international data transfers, such as model contracts and binding corporate rules; and conflicts between US security requirements and EU data protection law. The book provides pragmatic guidance for companies faced with data protection compliance issues. It includes extensive appendices, such as texts of the relevant directives, model contracts, and overviews of Member State implementations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics. Enabled by the exponential increase of data that is collected, transmitted, and processed transnationally, these changes have important implications for international economic law (IEL). This volume examines the dynamic interplay between AI and IEL by addressing an array of critical new questions, including: How to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze AI for purposes of IEL? How is AI affecting established concepts and rubrics of IEL? Is there a need to reconfigure IEL, and if so, how? Contributors also respond to other cross-cutting issues, including digital inequality, data protection, algorithms and ethics, the regulation of AI-use cases (autonomous vehicles), and systemic shifts in e-commerce (digital trade) and industrial production (fourth industrial revolution). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book identifies and explains the different national approaches to data protection – the legal regulation of the collection, storage, transmission and use of information concerning identified or identifiable individuals – and determines the extent to which they could be harmonised in the foreseeable future. In recent years, data protection has become a major concern in many countries, as well as at supranational and international levels. In fact, the emergence of computing technologies that allow lower-cost processing of increasing amounts of information, associated with the advent and exponential use of the Internet and other communication networks and the widespread liberalization of the trans-border flow of information have enabled the large-scale collection and processing of personal data, not only for scientific or commercial uses, but also for political uses. A growing number of governmental and private organizations now possess and use data processing in order to determine, predict and influence individual behavior in all fields of human activity. This inevitably entails new risks, from the perspective of individual privacy, but also other fundamental rights, such as the right not to be discriminated against, fair competition between commercial enterprises and the proper functioning of democratic institutions. These phenomena have not been ignored from a legal point of view: at the national, supranational and international levels, an increasing number of regulatory instruments – including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation applicable as of 25 May 2018 – have been adopted with the purpose of preventing personal data misuse. Nevertheless, distinct national approaches still prevail in this domain, notably those that separate the comprehensive and detailed protective rules adopted in Europe since the 1995 Directive on the processing of personal data from the more fragmented and liberal attitude of American courts and legislators in this respect. In a globalized world, in which personal data can instantly circulate and be used simultaneously in communications networks that are ubiquitous by nature, these different national and regional approaches are a major source of legal conflict.