The progress in precision medicine has resulted in genomic technology spreading worldwide. This has raised concerns about the ethics of genetic data sharing and privacy. This article focuses on South Asia and first aims to identify, analyze, and understand the laws, regulations, and policies related to genetic data privacy and discrimination in that region. This is accomplished through a qualitative examination of existing laws and policies on privacy rights and a doctrinal analysis of legislation gathered from seven jurisdictions, viz. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Following the presentation of the country-specific study, the article turns to discussing the study's results, which suggest that the area lacks both national norms and a regional policy specific to the protection of personal genetic data. The article then offers possible reasons for this outcome and suggests that the countries must formulate culturally sensitive regulations and universally applicable legal principles for genetic privacy notwithstanding the existing challenges of poverty, non-uniform demographics, and an absence of political will.

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that the millennia-old approach of Jewish law to regulating surveillance, protecting communications, and governing collection and use of information offers important frameworks for protecting privacy in an age of big data and pervasive surveillance. The modern approach to privacy has not succeeded. Notions of individual “rights to be let alone” and “informational self-determination” offer little defense against rampant data collection and aggregation. The substantive promise of a “fundamental human right” of privacy has largely been reduced to illusory procedural safeguards of “notice” and “consent”—manipulable protections by which individuals “agree” to privacy terms with little understanding of the bargain and little power to opt out. Judaism, on the other hand, views privacy as a societal obligation and employs categorical behavioral and architectural mandates that bind all of society's members. It limits waiver of these rules and rejects both technological capacity and the related notion of “expectations” as determinants of privacy's content. It assumes the absence of anonymity and does not depend on the confidentiality of information or behavior, whether knowledge is later used or shared, or whether the privacy subject can show concrete personal harm. When certain types of sensitive information are publicly known or cannot help but be visible, Jewish law still provides rules against their use. Jewish law offers a language that can guide policy debates. It suggests a move from individual control over information as the mechanism for shaping privacy's meaning and enforcement, to a regime of substantive obligations—personal and organizational—to protect privacy. It recognizes the interconnected nature of human interests and comprehends the totality of the harm that pervasive surveillance wreaks on individuals and social relations. It offers a conceptual basis for extending traditional privacy protections to online spaces and new data uses. And it provides a language of dignity that recognizes unequal bargaining power, rejects the aggregation and use of information to create confining personal narratives and judgments, and demands equal protection for all humans.

The dialogue on data protection has so far been dominated by European and American voices. There are currently a few international conventions in place such as the Council of Europe's 1981 Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Automatic processing of personal data, the 1980 OECD Guidelines Governing the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data , which apply to 30 OECD countries, and the EU Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data, which binds EU member states but has had some impact on non-European countries due to the restriction on cross border flow of information.

This has changed with the emergence of the APEC Privacy Framework in 2004 which focuses on the importance of the free flow of information in the digital age. Does the APEC Privacy Framework have anything of value to add or does it dilute the standards already in place? This article will examine these questions and argue that perhaps the APEC Privacy Framework is the first step towards a truly global standard for data protection.