Protection and Customer Data Protection Start-up Companies: Indonesia on the Horns of a Dilemma

Protection and Customer Data Protection Start-up Companies: Indonesia on the Horns of a Dilemma

Indonesia has experienced a bloom of start-up companies in the past ten years. In the digital commerce sector, many investors, including from China, have directed their attention to Indonesia’s positive trends in business. However, this scaling up faces a classic legal hurdle–conflicting laws under a legal system. Two fields of law overlap regarding customer data protection in start-up companies in Indonesia: trade secrets protection and personal data protection. This paper proposes how Indonesia can balance the two conflicting law regimes to resolve the dilemma. The legal trends of other jurisdictions were assessed and a valuable concept was found in the decision of a United States court. The concept answers the question regarding how a country can make balanced legal and policy decisions to protect trade secrets and customer data simultaneously. The article concludes that customer data privacy is not protected in all situations in Indonesia since there is no clear legal boundary between the trade secrets and personal data protection regimes. To provide a clear demarcation in situations where both regimes overlap, Indonesia could adopt the criteria of“selective accumulation”of detailed and valuable information from customers. Based on this criteria, a mere name and address cannot be protected as trade secrets unless the start-up company can show that the name and address are associated with other valuable information about customer preferences. If Indonesia decides to adopt the above criteria, then the relevant laws in both regimes need to be amended to provide a clear boundary between the trade secrets and personal data protection legal regimes.