Greetings, fellow privacy professionals,

Time flies and it’s already August! The IAPP Asia Privacy Forum in Singapore was held in July and it was extremely eventful and full of privacy-packed sessions. It was truly a great experience for all who attended. I strongly encourage you to attend at least one IAPP conference each year to extend your network of connections as well as to keep up-to-date with industry developments. You can click here for the full list of global IAPP conferences. In Asia-Pacific, the IAPP ANZ Summit is the next big event and will be held 29-30 Oct. 2019. (Click here for more details.)

Locally in Hong Kong, it was great to see Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Stephen Kai-yi Wong and former Government Chief Information Officer Allen Yeung at a ceremony this week, where the Institute of Big Data Governance announced the launch of “the world’s first compatible Big Data Governance Principles and Independent Assessment Scheme to create a trusted data governance framework for business and society as the world enters an era of data-driven digital economy.”­ (Local language news here.) This initiative aims to harmonize and promote key objectives from an open platform to foster a data driven digital economy through providing certifications based on independent assessment schemes and more. I am sure there will be more developments in this space and look forward to sharing how this develops for the Greater Bay Area initiative. I was also honored to represent the IAPP and be a part of the APAC Data Privacy Roundtable hosted by Addleshaw Goddard. The event started with a very engaging keynote by Addelshaw Goddard Legal Director Ivan Chang, highlighting the recent local data privacy issues and implications and insights followed by a panel discussion on global data transfers and the emerging privacy and security risks for the APAC region.

In other regional news, the government of Western Australia announced it is proposing “a whole-of-government framework to govern the way the public sector manages the information it holds on citizens.” This is a great step in the right direction with the additional suggestion of proposing a Western Australian privacy commissioner for the state, and a government chief data officer. This is timely news for the state, as the University of Western Australia and Australian National University had 30 years’ worth of student data stolen and 19 years’ worth of data accessed respectively. With the growing importance of security and data privacy, an independent body well versed with regional and global regulations would provide a significant boost to help guide local industries in the right direction and provide much-needed support to improve the overall security and data privacy ecosystem in the region.

Look forward to sharing more developments in this space in the next IAPP Digest!

Keep safe; keep secure.