SaaS Agreements – GDPR – New German Data Protection Law (BDSG)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will replace the existing EU Data Protection Directive and aims to harmonise European data protection law from the 25th of May 2018. In Germany, the Government has already amended the existing German Data Protection Act (BDSG) and from the 25th of May 2018 the New German Data Protection Act (New BDSG) and the GDPR will apply together.

Compliance with the New BDSG

Both SaaS suppliers and SaaS customers who provide services to German clients or who collect or process personal data of German data subjects on behalf of international SaaS clients, will need to comply with the terms of the New BDSG in addition to the terms of the GDPR. The New BDSG sets out derogations from certain parts of the GDPR and additional obligations.

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SaaS Agreements – Data Protection – Which law applies?

UK SaaS suppliers who provide cloud computing services to SaaS customers located outside of the UK are increasingly being required to comply not just with UK data protection law, but also the data protection laws of the countries in which the SaaS customer and its clients are based. This increasingly creates problems for SaaS suppliers, as data protection laws generally assume that data is stored/processed in one place. However when operating in the cloud data is often moved between jurisdictions and often it may be unclear exactly where data is being stored or processed and who is storing and processing it.

Two recent cases against Facebook and Google show the extent of this developing problem.

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