Outside of the United States, international data transfer laws are governed by regional, local privacy, and data protection laws. Multinational businesses must understand the implications such laws have on e-discovery. First, one must again draw distinctions between the U.S. and other nations. For example, when we are discussing “personal data” in the US, we are referring to such things as financial and medical data. Within the EU, however, personal data refers to such things as electronic mail. Privacy Directives and member state enabling legislation as data which can be traced to an identifiable individual (the “sender,” or “from” line).

The US is fairly lax in what it allows outside of its borders, boasting very little in the way of statutes preventing the transportation of data. Yet, the E.U. Privacy Directives and enabling legislation hold that personal data (again, all email), may not be sent outside the European Economic Area (the E.U. member states plus Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway to any country with lesser data protection than the E.U. There are only a few nations that meet the EU’s standards for data transfer: Canada, Switzerland and Argentina. And this scheme is not limited to the E.U.; Chile and Venezuela have similar restrictions, and Japan requires consent of the data subject for email to be sent outside the country.

via International E-Discovery Compliance- Privacy First | Business44.Com – Business Site.