Welcome to this week’s Asia Pacific Dashboard Digest. 

In this issue, do check out some local privacy perspectives on United States v. Microsoft Corp. If you haven’t been following this, you might ask why you (as a privacy professional in Australia, New Zealand or Asia) should be interested in a U.S. Supreme Court case. But picture this: Your company is served with a warrant from a U.S. court requiring production of records containing personal information. Your advice is sought on how to respond – and you are faced with a quandary. The privacy legislation in your country authorizes disclosures required by your local/national courts, not U.S. courts. Which comes first?  

Microsoft’s response — when it was served with a U.S. warrant seeking access to records containing personal data on its Irish servers — was to put Irish data protection law first and to challenge the warrant. The case has been working its way through the U.S. courts for years, with Microsoft’s (pro-privacy) position being vindicated so far (some great insights from Microsoft are in Brad Smith’s blog). Now the case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The results could be far reaching, as explained in the submission filed by the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner (a neutral amicus brief) and also the report included in this Digest issue. Arguments will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court on 27 Feb. 2018.  

On other fronts, 28 Jan. is known as Data Privacy Day in North America and Data Protection Day in the EU. In this part of the world, we place our emphasis on Privacy Awareness Week in May — but cheers to all our privacy colleagues in the northern hemisphere who will be taking time out to mark the day. Back here in Melbourne, 28 Jan. will be dominated by the Australian Open men’s tennis final. At the time of writing, we don’t yet know who will make it through the semi-finals to the final — but how good would a South Korean (underdog) victory be!  

All the best,
Carolyn