Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and its significant impacts in our daily lives, extremely intrusive data processing activities have been negotiated and taken into place by governments, public institutions, and organizations. In this respect, due to the measures taken in order to mitigate the risk regarding pandemic, many governments have decided to use geolocation tools to determine possibly infected ones by checking the routes that have been used by infected people.

As a precaution against the rapid spread of the global pandemic, many of the companies switched to remote working strategies and started to apply social distance rules to mitigate the effect of the Covid-19. With the increase in the number of people working remotely, companies and organizations will undoubtedly have to think about how to execute documents and contracts, along with the measures taken against the Covid-19.

Turkish Personal Data Protection Board (“Board”) released its recent rulings in summary regarding the application of the Law on the Protection of Personal Data No. 6698 (“Law No. 6698”) on April 15, 2020. In this information note, you will be provided extracts of these two summaries.

As per the Law on Mitigating the Effects of the New Coronavirus (Covid-19) Outbreak on Economic and Social Life and the Law Amending Certain Laws published in the Official Gazette numbered 31102 on April 17, 2020; a new provisional article was added to Turkish Commercial Code numbered 6102 (“TCC”) highlighting the economic impacts of Covid-19 on the company resources.

As per the Law Amending Certain Laws and Law on Mitigate the Effects of the New Coronavirus (Covid-19) Outbreak on Economic and Social Life published in the Official Gazette dated April 17, 2020 No. 31102, a new provisional article was added to the Labor Law numbered 4857 (“Law No. 4857”).

In order to reduce ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic some measures are taken regarding social and economic life in Turkey. With the Draft Amendment Law Amending Certain Acts (“Draft Law”), amendments to various laws including public procurement law, commercial law, employment law, maritime law, and internet and electronic communications law are introduced.

Turkish Personal Data Protection Authority (“the Authority”) has published a new announcement regarding the data processing activities on the location data for the purposes of combatting Covid-19.

As per the new regulation amending the Consumer Arbitration Committees Regulation (“the Regulation”) published in the Official Gazette dated April 10, 2020, to mitigate the effects of Covid-19, some amendments  have been made to prevent losses that may arise in relation to the working procedures and principles of consumer arbitration committees.