This Global Trends benchmark on privacy in the digital age covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States.

Among the main findings of this research:

• A new privacy law was adopted in China in November 2021 and the amended privacy law in Japan became effective in April 2022. Canada and India both introduced new privacy bills to Parliament.
• Most of the surveyed countries apply general privacy rules to location data and treat biometric data as a sensitive category of personal data, where explicit consent is generally required.
• Not all countries have set up an independent data protection authority (DPA). In the countries which have DPAs, they vary significantly in their years of operation and level of resources. Concerns about insufficient resources have been expressed even in advanced regions like the EU.
• There are few examples of significant data protection fines involving big tech, and the fines have generally been low compared to the size of the companies. The one standout is the US where Facebook reached a US$5bn settlement with the US government. In the EU, the Luxembourg DPA imposed the highest fine over General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) infringements (US$837m) on Amazon.

Read the full research and discover how privacy is regulated and its enforcement works in practice across 12 different geographies around the world by clicking on “Access the full content” (Global Trends clients).

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