As the Brexit transition period draws to a close, businesses will need to consider their data protection efforts to comply with both UK and EU regimes.
By Gail Crawford, Fiona Maclean, and Amy Smyth
The end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020 will have several data protection consequences. The impact of one of the more significant implications — the UK becoming a third country for the purposes of EU-to-UK personal data transfers — has been mitigated by a four to six-month grace period in the EU & UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (the Trade Agreement).
The Trade Agreement’s grace period states that personal data may be transferred from the EU to the UK as if the UK has not become a third country on 1 January 2021 (Article FINPROV.10A). This provision means that the requirement for a data transfer mechanism to legalise such transfers under the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will not be triggered on 1 January 2021, and these transfers may continue as during the Brexit transition period.
Between December 2019 and May 2020, the French data protection authority (CNIL) conducted multiple online investigations by visiting google.fr and amazon.fr, before launching a full-scale investigation into Google LLC, Google Ireland, and Amazon Europe Core. On 7 December 2020, the CNIL handed down two decisions, one against 
On 12 November 2020, the European Commission (the Commission) published a 
On 10 November, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) released its much anticipated 
Last year, more than half of all payments in the UK were made by card and contactless methods, while cash made up less than a quarter of all payments for the first time, according to the trade association UK Finance. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift towards a cashless society, as governments across Europe encourage citizens and businesses to adopt cashless solutions. At the start of the lockdown, in the spring, ATM transaction volumes in the UK fell 62% year on year, while the daily cash transaction volumes dropped by as much as 90% in Spain, according to the Financial Times. 
On 8 September 2020, the Swiss data protection authority, Adrian Lobsiger (the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner, FDPIC), concluded in his annual review that the Swiss-US Privacy Shield does not provide an adequate level of protection for personal data transfer from Switzerland to the US pursuant to the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP). Mirroring the Court of Justice in the European Union’s (CJEU’s) findings in the recent Schrems II decision, the FDPIC also concludes that the standard contractual clauses (SCCs), and binding corporate rules (BCRs) (as applied in Switzerland), may not provide for adequate protection for transfers to the US or other third countries. 
The Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) recently issued a new data protection law and regulations: the Data Protection Law DIFC Law No. 5 of 2020 and the Data Protection Regulations (together, the DIFC DP Legislation). The new law, which became effective on 1 July 2020, sets a significant benchmark for data privacy in the Middle East and aligns the DIFC’s data protection framework with international data protection regulations, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 
Following the 
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in France, Spartoo SAS (Spartoo) is one of the leaders of the European online shoe retail market. On 31 May 2018, a week after the entry into application of the GDPR, the French Data Protection Authority (the CNIL) launched an on-site investigation of Spartoo in cooperation with other EU supervisory authorities. The CNIL eventually handed down its 
On July 3, 2020, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) issued the draft Data Security Law (DSL) for public comment. Once finalized, the DSL, together with the PRC Network Security Law and the proposed PRC Personal Information Protection Law, will form an increasingly comprehensive legal framework for information and data security. 