In response to the global trends, the Japanese government announced a policy to strengthen the personal data protection on April 25 2019. It will enhance the right for individuals to demand companies to stop using their personal information. Under the current law, individuals can demand it, only if such data has been fraudulently acquired or used for purposes other than the original intent. On the other hand, the government has considered the creation of the so-called data bank, as introduced before. The data bank distributes personal data with the consent of the individuals. Then, it provides them with the compensation. I hear that, in the demonstration experiment, most users have chosen to […]

The previous article covered a failure of legislation for piracy website blocking due to legal considerations of constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication. Now the secrecy of communication is likely to apply to foreign platform providers, especially to big tech companies called GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), according to a draft document distributed in an advisory committee meeting which was held on January 21 2019. The scope of the secrecy of communication covers not only the communication content but also the date and time of the communication, the identification of communication parties, and everything which can be used to infer the semantic contents of the communication. Therefore, it may make an impact […]

Piracy website blocking has been one of the most controversial topics in Japan. In April 2018, the government decided on a policy to legislate for piracy website blocking by Internet providers, to combat piracy websites with copyright infringing content of manga, animation etc. However, it has been strongly opposed by lawyers and academics out of fear that it is likely to infringe on the constitutionally guaranteed secrecy of communication. Accordingly, the government reportedly has decided to postpone the legislation, and instead it is considering alternative measures – e.g. regulating leech sites which guide users to piracy sites. It is rare (at least in the intellectual property field) that the government […]

How much would you sell your personal data? Japan has been considering building a data market to assist companies create new services, as previously reported. The first application in such a data market would be the personal data exchange. Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation (MUTB), the second largest in trust business in Japan, announced that it starts a demonstration experiment for a new data management service from this August. Reportedly, it will launch this new service in 2019. The feature of this service is that individuals will be able to specify the personal data to be provided and a company which is permitted to use the data, while participant companies […]