Evolving legal landscape for Australian businesses operating in the UK and EU

This article was first published in the LexisNexis Privacy Law Bulletin, issue 22.02.

Australian businesses providing B2C or B2B digital services in the United Kingdom (UK) or the European Union (EU) must consider new regulatory frameworks concerning various aspects of digital services such as artificial intelligence (AI), online safety, data and data privacy, and cyber security.

AI regulation

The AI Act (AIA) will apply to any Australian businesses that develop, use, import, or distribute an AI system in the EU. From 2 February 2025, various provisions became effective.

Firstly, AI systems which pose unacceptable risk designed for manipulation and deception, harmful exploitation of age or other vulnerabilities, social scoring in unrelated social contexts, predicting delinquency, data scraping for facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometric categorisation and real time remote biometric identification are prohibited under Article 5.

The AI Act (AIA) will apply to any Australian businesses that develop, use, import, or distribute an AI system in the EU. From 2 February 2025, various provisions became effective.

Firstly, AI systems which pose unacceptable risk designed for manipulation and deception, harmful exploitation of age or other vulnerabilities, social scoring in unrelated social contexts, predicting delinquency, data scraping for facial recognition, emotion recognition, biometric categorisation and real time remote biometric identification are prohibited under Article 5.

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