Data privacy endangered by international trade agreements

You might or might not know that some countries – especially some European ones – have (or are working on) strong data protection laws.

What most people don’t know is that these laws might be voided by a number of legally enforceable trade agreements that are currently under negotiation: the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Trade In Services Agreement, and so on.

Some of these negotiations are performed in secret, but there are occasional leaks that offer insight in what we might expect.

At the re:publica conference held last week in Berlin, Sanya Smith, a legal advisor and senior researcher with Third World Network, sifted through this leaked materials, and talked about the implications these trage agreements will have for various sectors including digital culture: