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Countries

IcelandChecked 18 August 2026

Depends on your industryWork: HighEnforcement: Active

In one paragraph: Iceland follows Europe's privacy rulebook, so personal data can leave the country once the right paperwork is in place. Two local rules surprise people: a company's accounting records must physically be kept in Iceland, and health record systems can only be hosted by a certified provider. The privacy regulator is small but genuinely busy, and it fines public bodies too.
The catch: The relaxed answer is true for personal data only. Iceland's bookkeeping law says a company's books, invoices and receipts must be kept in Iceland for seven years, and only lets you hold them abroad for up to six months — and breaking the bookkeeping law is a crime, not a fine from the privacy regulator. Health record hosting has its own certification wall. Separately, three European laws that people assume apply here — the Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2, and the Artificial Intelligence Act — have NOT yet been brought into Icelandic law, so the rights and deadlines they create do not exist in Iceland today.
Does this apply to me?: Yes, it reaches you with no office in Iceland. Iceland applies Europe's General Data Protection Regulation through the European Economic Area agreement, so the rules cover any organisation anywhere in the world that offers goods or services to people in Iceland, or that watches what they do. There is no size or revenue threshold to duck under. If your organisation has no establishment anywhere in Europe, you normally have to name a representative inside Europe who people and the regulator can contact.High confidence
Can the data leave the country?: For personal data, yes — it can leave once you have the right paperwork. Two Icelandic rules cut across that headline. First, your company's accounting books, invoices and receipts must be kept in Iceland for seven years; the law only lets you hold them abroad for up to six months. Second, a health record system can sit with an outside host only if that host holds a recognised security certificate and the normal rules for sending data out of Europe are met.Medium confidence
What do I have to do to send it abroad?: You use one of the standard European routes. Send the data to a country Europe has officially approved, or sign the European Commission's standard contract with the recipient, or use group-wide rules a regulator has approved. Narrow one-off exceptions exist, such as the person's explicit consent, but they are not for routine or bulk transfers. One Icelandic wrinkle catches people out: an approval of a foreign country only takes effect in Iceland once the Icelandic minister confirms it and publishes a notice in the official gazette.Medium confidence
Who enforces this — and are they actually working?: Persónuvernd, the Icelandic Data Protection Authority. It is genuinely operational, not a name on paper: it registered 2,124 new cases in 2025 and closed 2,232, it opens its own investigations without waiting for a complaint, and it fines public bodies as well as private companies. It is also small — about 17 staff and a budget of roughly 379 million krónur (about $2.8 million) — and it says in its own annual report that it cannot cover every task the law gives it.High confidence
How long must I keep it, and when must I delete it?: There is a floor and a ceiling, and they point in opposite directions. The floor: accounting books, invoices and receipts must be kept for seven years — and kept in Iceland. The ceiling: under the European rules you must delete personal data once you no longer need it for the purpose you collected it for. When the two clash, the keeping duty wins; a person cannot force you to delete records the bookkeeping and tax law requires you to hold.High confidence
What happens when something goes wrong?: Count at least two clocks, and three if you are a financial firm. You have 72 hours to report a personal data breach to Persónuvernd, and you must tell the people affected without delay where the risk to them is high. Separately, operators of critical services — banks, hospitals, energy, water, transport and digital infrastructure — must alert Iceland's national cyber security team as soon as possible under a 2019 law, and serious breaches of that law can lead to prosecution. Financial firms have a further, tighter reporting duty to the Central Bank under the European operational resilience rules.Medium confidence
What's the trap?: Five things that are not in the summary. (1) A child in Iceland is anyone under 13 for online consent, not 16 as in much of Europe — so a design built for a 16-year-old threshold is wrong here. (2) Your accounting records must sit in Iceland, and bookkeeping offences are criminal: fines, and up to six years in prison for serious cases, investigated by the district prosecutor and the tax investigators, not by the privacy regulator. (3) Public bodies can be fined in Iceland — the law says so expressly, unlike several European countries. (4) Some processing needs a licence from Persónuvernd before you start, which is unusual under the European regime. (5) Three European laws you may assume apply here do not yet: the Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2, and the Artificial Intelligence Act have not been brought into the European Economic Area agreement.High confidence
What's about to change?: The main thing to watch is not an Icelandic bill but the queue of European laws waiting to be pulled into Icelandic law. The Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2 and the Artificial Intelligence Act are all still outside the European Economic Area agreement as of 18 August 2026, and each will land when a joint committee decides — with no Icelandic public consultation and often at short notice. The financial resilience regulation already landed this way on 1 July 2025, more than five months after it started applying in the European Union.High confidence
Hardest industry wall: All industries — Lög um bókhald

South KoreaChecked 18 August 2026

Depends on your industryWork: HighEnforcement: Aggressive

In one paragraph: South Korea's privacy law bans sending personal data abroad unless you have one of five grounds. The usual one is a separate consent, ticked apart from every other consent. Since September 2025 the 30 European countries need no extra paperwork. But banking, health records, government cloud and detailed maps have hard walls no consent can unlock, and the regulator fines foreign companies often.
The catch: The 'get consent and send it' headline stops being true the moment you touch six areas: bank and payment systems, financial customers' national ID numbers, hospital records, government cloud, detailed mapping data, and personal location services. In those areas the data or the machine holding it must physically sit in South Korea, and in the government cloud case so must the people who run it.
Does this apply to me?: Yes. The regulator fines companies with no Korean office. In July 2026 it fined TikTok's Singapore company and two Apple companies based in Ireland and Singapore for collecting Korean users' data and sending it abroad without a proper legal basis. If your worldwide revenue was 1 trillion won (about $720 million) or more last year, or you held data on an average of 1 million or more people in Korea per day over the last three months of last year, you must appoint a representative in Korea. Since April 2026, if you already own or control a Korean company, that Korean company has to be the representative.High confidence
Can the data leave the country?: In general yes, but only if you have one of five grounds, and the usual one is a separate consent that the person ticks apart from every other consent. Since September 2025 you can also send data to the 27 European Union countries plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein with no extra step at all, because the regulator has formally accepted their protection as equal to Korea's. That is the only such list, and no other country is on it. Six industries override all of this and are covered below.High confidence
What do I have to do to send it abroad?: Korea does not police the destination. It polices your paperwork. There is no banned-country list and no approval application to file: you pick one of the five grounds, and for most companies that means asking each person for a separate transfer consent that lists what goes, where, to whom, for how long and how to refuse. The one destination list that exists is a positive one, and it holds exactly 30 countries: the European Union plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Send data anywhere else and you also have to keep security measures, a complaints route and a dispute process in place, and write the transfer into your contract with the recipient.High confidence
Who enforces this — and are they actually working?: The Personal Information Protection Commission, chaired by Song Kyoung-hee, and it is one of the busiest privacy regulators in the world right now. In July 2026 alone it fined the telecoms company KT about 54 billion won (roughly $39 million) over a data breach, fined TikTok about 10.3 billion won (roughly $7.4 million) and Apple about 252 million won (roughly $180,000). It referred KT to prosecutors for obstructing the investigation and asked police to investigate LG U+ for destroying a server before the inquiry started. Finance is separately policed by the Financial Services Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service; health by the health ministry; maps by an inter-agency committee that includes the intelligence service.High confidence
How long must I keep it, and when must I delete it?: Two forces pull in opposite directions. The ceiling: you must destroy personal data without delay once you no longer need it, and destroy it so it cannot be recovered. The floor: other laws make you keep things. An online seller must keep advertising records for 6 months, complaint and dispute records for 3 years, and contract, cancellation, payment and delivery records for 5 years. Almost everyone must keep system access logs for at least 1 year, and 2 years if the system holds data on 50,000 or more people, holds national ID numbers or sensitive data, or belongs to a licensed telecoms carrier. When the two clash, the keeping rule wins, but you must store that data separately from everything else.High confidence
What happens when something goes wrong?: Count two clocks, and in telecoms and finance a third. Under the privacy law you have 72 hours to tell the affected people, and a separate 72 hours to report to the Commission or to the Korea Internet and Security Agency. The reporting clock starts if 1,000 or more people are affected, or if any sensitive data or national ID numbers leaked, or if the cause was someone breaking in from outside. Separately, an internet service provider must report a cyber incident to the science ministry or the same agency immediately. A hospital must also tell the health ministry about a medical-records incident.High confidence
What's the trap?: Five things that will cost you a weekend. One: the children's age line is 14, not 13 or 16, and processing an under-14's data without a parent's consent is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, not just a fine. Two: hiding or destroying material during a regulator's inspection is itself a crime, and the regulator used it in July 2026. Three: stripping names out of a dataset does not free it. Four: a bank's Korean customers' national ID numbers may not leave the country at all, and any offshore processing of customers' financial transaction data needs a report to the supervisor 30 business days before work starts. Five: if you want to run a personal location service you must be a corporation and be registered, so you cannot serve Korea from abroad with no entity.High confidence
What's about to change?: The privacy regulator started rewriting the rulebook for artificial intelligence. It set up a reform task force on 30 July 2026, ran a public suggestion window from 6 to 31 August 2026, and plans to publish the direction of reform before the end of 2026. Consent-based rules and the block on sending pseudonymised data abroad for research are both explicitly on the table. Separately, Apple's request to export detailed Korean map data has been pending since its deadline was extended in December 2025, and Google's equivalent request was granted in February 2026 on strict conditions, so the mapping picture can move again at any time.High confidence
Hardest industry wall: Banking — 전자금융감독규정 (Regulation on Supervision of Electronic Financial Transactions)
Finance — 금융회사의 정보처리 업무 위탁에 관한 규정 (Regulation on Outsourcing of Data Processing Business by Financial Companies)
Health and social care — 전자의무기록의 관리·보존에 필요한 시설과 장비에 관한 기준 (Standards for the Facilities and Equipment Required to Manage and Preserve Electronic Medical Records)
Government — 클라우드컴퓨팅서비스 보안인증에 관한 고시 (Notice on Security Certification of Cloud Computing Services)
Mapping and location — 공간정보의 구축 및 관리 등에 관한 법률 (Act on the Establishment and Management of Spatial Data)

The eight framework questions answered for each selected country
Question	IcelandChecked 18 August 2026	South KoreaChecked 18 August 2026
The three ratings	Depends on your industry Work: High Enforcement: Active	Depends on your industry Work: High Enforcement: Aggressive
In one paragraph	Iceland follows Europe's privacy rulebook, so personal data can leave the country once the right paperwork is in place. Two local rules surprise people: a company's accounting records must physically be kept in Iceland, and health record systems can only be hosted by a certified provider. The privacy regulator is small but genuinely busy, and it fines public bodies too.	South Korea's privacy law bans sending personal data abroad unless you have one of five grounds. The usual one is a separate consent, ticked apart from every other consent. Since September 2025 the 30 European countries need no extra paperwork. But banking, health records, government cloud and detailed maps have hard walls no consent can unlock, and the regulator fines foreign companies often.
The catch	The relaxed answer is true for personal data only. Iceland's bookkeeping law says a company's books, invoices and receipts must be kept in Iceland for seven years, and only lets you hold them abroad for up to six months — and breaking the bookkeeping law is a crime, not a fine from the privacy regulator. Health record hosting has its own certification wall. Separately, three European laws that people assume apply here — the Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2, and the Artificial Intelligence Act — have NOT yet been brought into Icelandic law, so the rights and deadlines they create do not exist in Iceland today.	The 'get consent and send it' headline stops being true the moment you touch six areas: bank and payment systems, financial customers' national ID numbers, hospital records, government cloud, detailed mapping data, and personal location services. In those areas the data or the machine holding it must physically sit in South Korea, and in the government cloud case so must the people who run it.
Does this apply to me?	Yes, it reaches you with no office in Iceland. Iceland applies Europe's General Data Protection Regulation through the European Economic Area agreement, so the rules cover any organisation anywhere in the world that offers goods or services to people in Iceland, or that watches what they do. There is no size or revenue threshold to duck under. If your organisation has no establishment anywhere in Europe, you normally have to name a representative inside Europe who people and the regulator can contact.High confidence	Yes. The regulator fines companies with no Korean office. In July 2026 it fined TikTok's Singapore company and two Apple companies based in Ireland and Singapore for collecting Korean users' data and sending it abroad without a proper legal basis. If your worldwide revenue was 1 trillion won (about $720 million) or more last year, or you held data on an average of 1 million or more people in Korea per day over the last three months of last year, you must appoint a representative in Korea. Since April 2026, if you already own or control a Korean company, that Korean company has to be the representative.High confidence
Can the data leave the country?	For personal data, yes — it can leave once you have the right paperwork. Two Icelandic rules cut across that headline. First, your company's accounting books, invoices and receipts must be kept in Iceland for seven years; the law only lets you hold them abroad for up to six months. Second, a health record system can sit with an outside host only if that host holds a recognised security certificate and the normal rules for sending data out of Europe are met.Medium confidence	In general yes, but only if you have one of five grounds, and the usual one is a separate consent that the person ticks apart from every other consent. Since September 2025 you can also send data to the 27 European Union countries plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein with no extra step at all, because the regulator has formally accepted their protection as equal to Korea's. That is the only such list, and no other country is on it. Six industries override all of this and are covered below.High confidence
What do I have to do to send it abroad?	You use one of the standard European routes. Send the data to a country Europe has officially approved, or sign the European Commission's standard contract with the recipient, or use group-wide rules a regulator has approved. Narrow one-off exceptions exist, such as the person's explicit consent, but they are not for routine or bulk transfers. One Icelandic wrinkle catches people out: an approval of a foreign country only takes effect in Iceland once the Icelandic minister confirms it and publishes a notice in the official gazette.Medium confidence	Korea does not police the destination. It polices your paperwork. There is no banned-country list and no approval application to file: you pick one of the five grounds, and for most companies that means asking each person for a separate transfer consent that lists what goes, where, to whom, for how long and how to refuse. The one destination list that exists is a positive one, and it holds exactly 30 countries: the European Union plus Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Send data anywhere else and you also have to keep security measures, a complaints route and a dispute process in place, and write the transfer into your contract with the recipient.High confidence
Who enforces this — and are they actually working?	Persónuvernd, the Icelandic Data Protection Authority. It is genuinely operational, not a name on paper: it registered 2,124 new cases in 2025 and closed 2,232, it opens its own investigations without waiting for a complaint, and it fines public bodies as well as private companies. It is also small — about 17 staff and a budget of roughly 379 million krónur (about $2.8 million) — and it says in its own annual report that it cannot cover every task the law gives it.High confidence	The Personal Information Protection Commission, chaired by Song Kyoung-hee, and it is one of the busiest privacy regulators in the world right now. In July 2026 alone it fined the telecoms company KT about 54 billion won (roughly $39 million) over a data breach, fined TikTok about 10.3 billion won (roughly $7.4 million) and Apple about 252 million won (roughly $180,000). It referred KT to prosecutors for obstructing the investigation and asked police to investigate LG U+ for destroying a server before the inquiry started. Finance is separately policed by the Financial Services Commission and the Financial Supervisory Service; health by the health ministry; maps by an inter-agency committee that includes the intelligence service.High confidence
How long must I keep it, and when must I delete it?	There is a floor and a ceiling, and they point in opposite directions. The floor: accounting books, invoices and receipts must be kept for seven years — and kept in Iceland. The ceiling: under the European rules you must delete personal data once you no longer need it for the purpose you collected it for. When the two clash, the keeping duty wins; a person cannot force you to delete records the bookkeeping and tax law requires you to hold.High confidence	Two forces pull in opposite directions. The ceiling: you must destroy personal data without delay once you no longer need it, and destroy it so it cannot be recovered. The floor: other laws make you keep things. An online seller must keep advertising records for 6 months, complaint and dispute records for 3 years, and contract, cancellation, payment and delivery records for 5 years. Almost everyone must keep system access logs for at least 1 year, and 2 years if the system holds data on 50,000 or more people, holds national ID numbers or sensitive data, or belongs to a licensed telecoms carrier. When the two clash, the keeping rule wins, but you must store that data separately from everything else.High confidence
What happens when something goes wrong?	Count at least two clocks, and three if you are a financial firm. You have 72 hours to report a personal data breach to Persónuvernd, and you must tell the people affected without delay where the risk to them is high. Separately, operators of critical services — banks, hospitals, energy, water, transport and digital infrastructure — must alert Iceland's national cyber security team as soon as possible under a 2019 law, and serious breaches of that law can lead to prosecution. Financial firms have a further, tighter reporting duty to the Central Bank under the European operational resilience rules.Medium confidence	Count two clocks, and in telecoms and finance a third. Under the privacy law you have 72 hours to tell the affected people, and a separate 72 hours to report to the Commission or to the Korea Internet and Security Agency. The reporting clock starts if 1,000 or more people are affected, or if any sensitive data or national ID numbers leaked, or if the cause was someone breaking in from outside. Separately, an internet service provider must report a cyber incident to the science ministry or the same agency immediately. A hospital must also tell the health ministry about a medical-records incident.High confidence
What's the trap?	Five things that are not in the summary. (1) A child in Iceland is anyone under 13 for online consent, not 16 as in much of Europe — so a design built for a 16-year-old threshold is wrong here. (2) Your accounting records must sit in Iceland, and bookkeeping offences are criminal: fines, and up to six years in prison for serious cases, investigated by the district prosecutor and the tax investigators, not by the privacy regulator. (3) Public bodies can be fined in Iceland — the law says so expressly, unlike several European countries. (4) Some processing needs a licence from Persónuvernd before you start, which is unusual under the European regime. (5) Three European laws you may assume apply here do not yet: the Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2, and the Artificial Intelligence Act have not been brought into the European Economic Area agreement.High confidence	Five things that will cost you a weekend. One: the children's age line is 14, not 13 or 16, and processing an under-14's data without a parent's consent is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, not just a fine. Two: hiding or destroying material during a regulator's inspection is itself a crime, and the regulator used it in July 2026. Three: stripping names out of a dataset does not free it. Four: a bank's Korean customers' national ID numbers may not leave the country at all, and any offshore processing of customers' financial transaction data needs a report to the supervisor 30 business days before work starts. Five: if you want to run a personal location service you must be a corporation and be registered, so you cannot serve Korea from abroad with no entity.High confidence
What's about to change?	The main thing to watch is not an Icelandic bill but the queue of European laws waiting to be pulled into Icelandic law. The Data Act, the cybersecurity law known as NIS2 and the Artificial Intelligence Act are all still outside the European Economic Area agreement as of 18 August 2026, and each will land when a joint committee decides — with no Icelandic public consultation and often at short notice. The financial resilience regulation already landed this way on 1 July 2025, more than five months after it started applying in the European Union.High confidence	The privacy regulator started rewriting the rulebook for artificial intelligence. It set up a reform task force on 30 July 2026, ran a public suggestion window from 6 to 31 August 2026, and plans to publish the direction of reform before the end of 2026. Consent-based rules and the block on sending pseudonymised data abroad for research are both explicitly on the table. Separately, Apple's request to export detailed Korean map data has been pending since its deadline was extended in December 2025, and Google's equivalent request was granted in February 2026 on strict conditions, so the mapping picture can move again at any time.High confidence
Hardest industry wall	All industries — Lög um bókhald	Banking — 전자금융감독규정 (Regulation on Supervision of Electronic Financial Transactions) Finance — 금융회사의 정보처리 업무 위탁에 관한 규정 (Regulation on Outsourcing of Data Processing Business by Financial Companies) Health and social care — 전자의무기록의 관리·보존에 필요한 시설과 장비에 관한 기준 (Standards for the Facilities and Equipment Required to Manage and Preserve Electronic Medical Records) Government — 클라우드컴퓨팅서비스 보안인증에 관한 고시 (Notice on Security Certification of Cloud Computing Services) Mapping and location — 공간정보의 구축 및 관리 등에 관한 법률 (Act on the Establishment and Management of Spatial Data)