Vietnam orders tech firms to store user data onshore

An web person browses by the Vietnamese authorities’s new Fb web page in Hanoi December 30, 2015.

HANOI, Aug 18 (Reuters) – Vietnam’s authorities has ordered expertise companies to retailer their customers’ knowledge domestically and arrange native workplaces, its newest transfer to tighten cybersecurity guidelines.

The brand new guidelines, issued in a decree on Wednesday, will apply to social media firms like Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Meta’s Fb (META.O), and telecommunications operators, and can take impact on October 1.

“Information of all web customers starting from monetary information and biometric knowledge to data on peoples’ ethnicity and political beliefs, or any knowledge created by customers whereas browsing the web have to be to saved domestically,” the decree said.

Authorities could have the best to subject knowledge assortment requests for objective of investigation and to ask service suppliers to take away content material whether it is deemed to violate the federal government’s pointers, the decree added.

International companies could have 12 months to arrange native knowledge storage and consultant workplaces after receiving directions from the Minister of Public Safety, and should retailer the information onshore for a minimal interval of 24 months, in keeping with the decree.

Two tech companies contacted by Reuters, Google and Meta, didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

Vietnam is run by the Communist Occasion, which maintains tight media censorship and tolerates little dissent. It has tightened web guidelines over the previous few years, culminating in a cybersecurity regulation that got here into impact in 2019 and nationwide pointers on social media behaviour launched in June final yr.

Reporting by Phuong Nguyen; Modifying by Kanupriya Kapoor

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