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Ammon News - The Senate on Monday returned the draft personal data law to the Lower House of Representatives with amendments to it during a session chaired by President Faisal Fayez attended by cabinet ministers.

The amendments allow entities subject to Central Bank control to process personal data, including the transfer and exchange of data inside or outside the Kingdom without informing the natural person whose data is being processed, and consider that procedure as "legal and legitimate," in addition to excluding the entities that process data for that purpose from the required licenses and permits, provided that it is not published or disclosed to others.

Processing means collecting, recording, copying, saving, storing, organizing, editing, exploiting, using, sending, distributing, transferring, displaying, concealing identity, encoding, destroying, restricting, erasing, modifying, describing or disclosing data in any way.

The Senators also added a clause requiring the issuance of a special system to regulate data processing and deleted "data access" from the processing definition contained in the bill, and that the Council of Ministers, not the Minister of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship, shall have the authority to nominate four persons with expertise and competence for the membership of the Personal Data Protection Council formed according to the law.

The Lower House will either insist on its previous decision or endorse the Senate's amendments.

Petra