After five years of negotiations, government ministers from the 12 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries - New Zealand and  Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam - announced their conclusions this week.

In our inter-connected world, legal advisers to businesses that operate online are increasingly expected to know or be able to find out something about other countries’ privacy laws. Asia is one of the world’s most significant economic regions and it is important to understand how the data protection and privacy environments of Asian countries work.

This is not a post about hot-dogs, pretzels, fries or pizza. What we call “takeaways”, Americans refer to as “take-out”, or simply as “fast food”. That’s why there’s no confusion in the US when the handbook for the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Global Privacy Summit explains what a participant can expect to “take away” from each session.

I’m in Washington DC to talk privacy, or data privacy, or data protection, or however else this growing international preoccupation is described in different jurisdictions, sectors and economies.

APEC recently moved one step closer towards the goal of updating its privacy framework in time to mark the 10th anniversary of the framework’s adoption in 2005.