I'm a little scared. And it's Facebook's fault. The thing is, for the longest time, the world was organized into discreet territories with their own sovereignty, powers, and abilities to control the trade that crossed their borders. They could physically stop something or someone from entering their country by holding them up at the border [...]
Data Intermediaries and Analytics Firms International treatment of data has led to the creation of a couple of categories of service providers: data intermediaries who are third parties that transfer data from one entity to another and are bound by the rules of specific jurisdictions, and analytics firms who take the data provided by banks [...]
Recently we prepared a memorandum for a major international organization related to data protection in Vietnam. It serves as a really good overview of the issue of how to treat data, both personal and corporate, and as such, I would like to include a version of that document here. What follows is a redacted and [...]
Know Your Customer, or KYC, is a process of identification and verification of customer information by financial entities[1] in accordance with the prevention and combating of money laundering and financing of terrorism. For KYC in Vietnam, financial entities must apply measures to identify customers in the following cases: When a customer initially opens an account [...]
Credit information is defined as “related data, figures, datum of borrowers in the participating organizations of a credit information company”, and credit information services provision refers to the provision of credit information products by credit information companies to its users on the basis of collecting, processing, and storing credit information. Credit information products are created [...]
On 28 October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and majority shareholder of Facebook (now Meta apparently) announced this thing called the Metaverse, a ripped off concept from countless science fiction books that, according to Wikipedia, is: a hypothesized iteration of the Internet, supporting persistent online 3-D virtual environments[1][2][3] through conventional personal computing, as well as virtual and augmented reality headsets. The idea, then, is to [...]
In the middle of writing about Sky Mavis and NFTs and cryptocurrency the Ministry of Public Security issued a draft decree related to cybersecurity. I didn't get the chance to write about this earlier, but I think it is important enough--as it offers some guidance on questions related to the Law on Cybersecurity of 2018--to [...]
I recently had a conversation with an official from the US Consulate here in Ho Chi Minh City, in which we discussed cryptocurrency and blockchain issues. On repeated occasions he asked the question: what makes blockchain different from a regular database? That got me thinking. There are certainly some instances in which there is no [...]
In September, the government of Laos authorized six companies to mine and trade cryptocurrency. This last week they announced that as part of the country's expansion into the cryptocurrency markets, they anticipate to include nearly 200 million USD in their 2022 national budget from Bitcoin mining. The theory is that, using the massive amounts of [...]
Last month the Government issued a draft decree on the process for obtaining and using electronic IDs in Vietnam. This comes as a welcome installment in Vietnam's slowly moving modernization of its legal regulations regarding the internet, data, and digital media. This post will review the basics of the draft decree relevant to most people [...]