ARTICLE
11 October 2022

Two-Minute Recap Of Recent Developments In Turkish Personal Data Protection Law – September 2022

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Gen Temizer

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Gen Temizer is a leading independent Turkish law firm located in Istanbul's financial centre. The Firm has an excellent track record of handling cross-border matters for clients and covers the full bandwidth of most complex transactions and litigation with its cross-departmental, multi-disciplinary and diverse team of over 30 lawyers. The Firm is deeply rooted in the local market with over 80 years of combined experience of the name partners while providing the highest global standards of legal services.
In September 2022, the Turkish Personal Data Protection Authority ("DPA") held several seminars and announced six data breach notifications, but released no decisions.
Turkey Privacy

October 2022  – In September 2022, the Turkish Personal Data Protection Authority (“DPA”) held several seminars and announced six data breach notifications, but released no decisions.

On 10 September, at an event organised by the Istanbul Bar Association Personal Data Protection Commission and Bahçeşehir University Faculty of Law, the President of the DPA stated that the DPA is preparing good practice guidelines for the protection of personal data in various sectors, including tourism, aviation, telecommunications and advertising.

DP law amendment coming soon!

A year ago, the Ministry of Justice established a Scientific Commission to amend Turkish Data Protection Law numbered 6698 in order to harmonise the local legal system with the EU's GDPR.

In September, the Scientific Committee's academic members announced that provisions on data transfers abroad and the processing of special categories of personal data have been prioritised. Parliament is expected to discuss these provisions during its next legislative session, which starts in October.

Seminars on machine learning and big data

On 21 September, the DPA held a seminar on the opportunities and risks of big data applications. The following issues were highlighted:

  • matching of user profiles between social networks;
  • using data in algorithms to create popularity and ranking characteristics relating to content on social platforms;
  • making data-driven decisions through data analysis;
  • risks of data storage units (i.e., cloud systems).

Earlier in the month, on 7 September, the DPA held a seminar on the processing of personal data in the context of machine learning. The following issues were highlighted:

  • problems that machine learning may cause in terms of personal data;
  • the need of cloud systems to store large amounts of data;
  • cross-border data transferring issues in connection with cloud systems;
  • data minimisation and personal data protection problems due to the large amount of data processing in machine learning processes;
  • difficulties in fulfilling the obligation to inform and obtain explicit consent.

The DPA announced the following data breach notifications in September:

Data Controller

Affected Data Subjects

Affected Personal Data

Number of Data Subjects

Flo Mağazacılık ve Pazarlama A.Ş.

Website users

Identity, Financial and Transaction Security Data

3,500

Özel Keystone Eğitim ve Eğitim Dan. A.Ş.

Employees, Users, Subscribers / Members, Students, Customers and Potential Customers

Identity, Communication, Financial Data, Personnel Information, Information on Legal Processes, Risk Management and Other

N/A

Marmara University

Employees and Users

Identity, Communication Data and Personnel Information

5,698

Fuudy Elektronik İletişim Perakende Gıda Lojistik Anonim Şirketi

N/A

Identity and Communication Data

81,452

Biblos Alaçatı Turizm Yatırımları A.Ş.

Employees, Customers and Potential Customers

Identity, Communication, Customer Transaction, Financial and Marketing Data, Audio and Visual Records, Health and Biometric Data

450

Posta ve Telgraf Teşkilatı Biriktirme ve Yardım Sandığı

Members

Identity and Transaction Security Data

38,000

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

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