On 17 October 2025, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan passed amendments to the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), establishing the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) as the new supervisory authority for personal data matters.
These changes respond to a 2022 Constitutional Court ruling and aim to strengthen independent oversight while enhancing data protection standards across both public and private sectors.
Key updates include mandatory appointment of Data Protection Officers (DPOs) for government agencies, new breach notification and reporting obligations for non-government entities, expanded inspection powers for the PDPC, and a six-year transition period for certain supervisory functions.
The PDPC will also issue baseline security regulations and serve as the appeals body for administrative decisions. The effective date will be set by the Executive Yuan, with implementation expected in 2026.
On 21 February 2025, the Ministry of Labor released the revised “Guidelines for Preventing Illegal Harm While Performing Duties (4th Edition).” The revised guidelines emphasize the establishment of an investigation team within three days for suspected illegal harm incidents, with specific team compositions based on organization size. The scope has been expanded to include personnel supervised by workplace managers, applying the same guidelines as for employees. The 4th edition also specifies potential workplace harm behaviors, including violence, bullying, sexual harassment, and discrimination, with examples of workplace bullying such as unrealistic work goals and excessive or trivial task assignments.
In response to the persistent issue of fraud, the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act (FCHPA) was passed by the Legislative Yuan and came into force on 31 July 2024. The FCHPA requires financial institutions, virtual asset service providers, telecom enterprises, online advertising platform operators, third-party payment service providers, e-commerce and online gaming companies to respectively take certain fraud prevention measures.
In September 2024, the Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) published the criteria of the online advertising platforms that would be subject to the FCHPA, designated four foreign online advertising platform operators that meet the criteria, and asking them to report their legal representative (can be a law firm) in Taiwan by 31 October 2024.
The Electronic Signatures Act of Taiwan, enacted in 2001, has undergone its first major amendment (“Amendment”) in response to the rapid global digital transformation and the changing landscape of digital services and digital economy in Taiwan. With the proliferation of digital solutions and the increasing demand for electronic documents and signatures, particularly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Taiwan Legislative Yuan passed the Amendment on 30 April 2024. The Amendment will take effect following the President’s promulgation.
In response to the “MeToo” movement, Taiwan’s Government amended the Act of Gender Equality in Employment (AGEE) on 31 July 2023. The new AGEE amendments will take effect on 8 March 2024.
The recent high-profile sexual harassment cases in Taiwan have raised concerns and triggered discussions about the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. In fact, among the various types of employee misconduct, sexual harassment has been mostly addressed in Taiwanese law. Taiwan’s Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Act of Gender Equality in Employment both require employers to provide a friendly and safe working environment, and provide detailed regulations for the process of investigations of sexual harassment complaints.
Taiwan and the US have concluded negotiations on five issues since the announcement of the Taiwan-US 21st Century Trade Initiative’s launch in June 2022, including trade facilitation, good manufacturing practices, domestic regulations for service industries, anti-corruption, and small and medium-sized enterprises. This is a key step towards the completion of the Taiwan-US FTA using the building block approach. The first agreement is expected to be signed in the next few weeks.
Due to an increase in cases of personal data breaches in recent years with incidents affecting large numbers of data subjects, critics have raised concerns about the existing penalties being too lenient to halt the frequent data breaches. In a high-profile case involving the secondary use of national health insurance data, the Taiwan Constitutional Court ruled in August 2022 that the lack of independent data protection authority is against the Constitution and requested the establishment of the relevant legal system within three years. The Taiwan Legislative Yuan passed the Amendment to the Personal Data Protection Act on 16 May 2023 to address these concerns.
Our Asia Pacific Employment & Compensation team is pleased to share our quarterly update, which highlights key employment law changes across the Asia Pacific region in the first quarter of 2023.
Baker McKenzie’s Sanctions Blog published the alert titled Taiwan expands the list of export control items to Russia and Belarus on 13 January 2023. Read the article via the link here. Please also visit our Sanctions Blog for the most recent updates.