Two company Binding Corporate Rules now approved

Andrew mentioned this story briefly the other day, but Naked Law has written about the Information Commissioner's Office's approval of Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) for Philips. The approval means that there are now two UK businesses with BCRS approved. The other one is GE, and you can see GE's BCRs here.

With the approved BCRs, Philips is able to transfer personal data of its clients and employees between its different group companies internationally without having to actively consider data protection law compliance each time it makes a transfer. However, Philips' compliance work is not yet over. As Naked Law points out:

"The authorisation only applies to the extent that Philips' international data transfers are within the jurisdiction of the Information Commissioner - Philips will now have use the UK authorisation to apply for approval from the other relevant EU jurisdictions from which it transfers data internationally using the so-called "co-operation procedure".

There are a number of methods of transferring personal data outside the EEA whilst complying with data protection law. We'll put a brief summary of these methods on the blog soon.