1 Bender on Privacy and Data Protection Ch. 33 (2020)
1 Bender on Privacy and Data Protection § 33.01 (2020)
The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (“APEC”) comprises a group of 21 nations, many of them large and prominent in international affairs. They have created an APEC Privacy Framework, which provides a methodology for participating nations to implement data protection, and in particular cross-border transfer. That methodology is being developed from a perspective that (a) equates the importance of international data flow with that of privacy of personal information, and (b) is premised on the notion that the focus of privacy should be on preventing harm, rather than covering the entire economy with a blanket of data protection. While the APEC Privacy Framework is still a work in progress, a number of concrete steps have been taken toward transforming it into an actual system for protecting personal information, especially with regard to cross-border transfer. In particular, APEC has developed a Cross Border Privacy Rules (“CBPR”), as discussed below.