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The EU and Japan have signed a deal on the free flow of data. Picture: Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, and Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, are seen during the EU-Japan summit in Tokyo, 17 July 2018. Photo credit: European Council 

Under the deal, organisations can transmit personal data between the EU and Japan without needing any particular authorisation. (They still have to observe either EU or Japanese rules.)

While EU equivalence agreements are fairly common in the financial sector, it’s unusual in the domain of privacy.

According to the Privacy & Information Security Law blog, run by the international law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth:

“This is the first time that the EU and a third country have agreed on a reciprocal recognition of the adequate level of data protection. So far, the EU has adopted only unilateral adequacy decisions with 12 other countries--namely, Andorra, Argentina, and Canadian organizations subject to PIPEDA, the Faroe Islands, Guernsey, Israel, the Isle of Man, Jersey, New Zealand, Switzerland, Uruguay and the United States (EU-U.S. Privacy Shield)--which allow personal data to flow safely from the EU to these countries.”

“This mutual adequacy arrangement will create the world’s largest area of safe transfers of data based on a high level of protection for personal data,” the European Commission said in a press release on 17 July (PDF).