NAFTA Talks: US proposal for cross border data storage at odds with BC, NS Law
U.S. challenging provincial privacy rules that require personal information to be stored on domestic servers
One of the American targets in the upcoming renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement appears on a collision course with privacy laws in British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
In negotiating objectives published last week, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said it wanted to “establish rules to ensure that NAFTA countries do not impose measures that restrict cross-border data flows and do not require the use or installation of local computing facilities.”
But provincial legislation in two Canadian provinces does exactly that, with rules requiring personal information collected by governments, such as health records, to be stored on domestic servers to prevent it being accessed for reasons other than those for which it was collected.