New Swiss DPA: Comparison With The GDPR

The revised Swiss Data Protection Act (revDPA) was passed by the Swiss Parliament in the fall of 2020 and will enter into force in 2022. The revision strengthens the protection of personal data provided by the current DPA to bring it in line with the level of protection provided by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It also aims to ensure that Switzerland maintains its status as a country that adequately protects personal data from an EU perspective.

But while the revDPA introduces a range of well-known instruments and obligations for controllers and processors from the GDPR, such as the obligation to maintain a record of processing activities, to provide certain minimal information to the data subjects, to conduct a data protection impact assessment in some cases, and to notify data breaches to the Swiss data protection authority (FDPIC), it also deviates from the GDPR in a number of respects and even goes beyond it in some areas.