The Effects of Brexit on Information Technology Law | The ninth

On December 24, 2020, negotiators agreed on a “Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom,” or Brexit for short. Just one week before December 31, 2020, the end of the transition after the UK leaves the European Union on January 31, 2020, Brexit can be prevented without a deal. Without the 1,200-page Brexit agreement, the FTA in the first place, economic ties and interdependence in particular would have been severely severed or hampered. Even with the Brexit deal, the consequences are dire – especially for the IT sector.

As long as the United Kingdom is a member of the European Union, the intergovernmental exchange of personal data takes place on the basis of European Union rules, which have been enacted either in the form of regulations or directives. The latter has mostly been transferred to national legal systems because it does not apply directly. According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the processing of personal data between companies in many European Union countries does not legally count as a transfer of data to a third country. The background to this is that the GDPR means that the same level of data protection generally applies in all European Union countries. The same rules apply to data transmission within an EU country.