The European Commission has announced an agreement with Japan on reciprocal adequacy for transfer of personal data, thereby creating “the world’s largest area of safe data flows”. This will require Japan to adopt safeguards to bridge differences between the two data protection frameworks. These rules will be binding on Japanese companies importing data from the EU, and enforceable by the Japanese independent data protection authority (PPC) and courts. On its side, the EC will obtain an opinion from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and approval from a committee of representatives of the EU Member States. The EC expects to finalise the agreement by Autumn 2018.
