September

The government announced that it will ban firms from requesting resident registration numbers for commercial and financial transactions. Credit cards, banks and other financial institutions must also wipe resident numbers from all documents and databases. In place of resident IDs, other security options such as My-PIN numbers are being introduced. The local financial sector, however, is skeptical over just how effective the new measures would be. While it agreed on the need to avoid yet another leak, most believed that the newly proposed options such as My-PIN would face challenges. As the revision does not apply to existing data, critics have warned of additional security breaches.

In a new turn to the Maximilian Schrems case in Ireland, the Irish High Court decided to refer several questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), including whether national data protection authorities in Europe may disregard the Safe Harbor decision of the European Commission when assessing whether the U.S. recipient of data ensures an adequate level of data protection required under EU law. Depending on the outcome, European and U.S. companies may not be able to rely on Safe Harbor to legitimise cross-border data transfers in the future. It will be interesting to see if the Court provides any rulings concerning the scope of European data protection.

Russia's State Duma and Federation Council have adopted amendments to Russia 's personal data protection act, which require that personal data of all Russians is stored inside the country. This data localization obligation will have a major impact on global social networking companies but also other companies that transmit electronic communications over the Internet. The Bill is waiting for the signature of Vladimir Putin and may become effective on September 1, 2016. It means that any foreign company using the personal data of Russian nationals outside Russia must locate its servers in Russian Federation territory. Otherwise, access to this type of information resource will be blocked.