Federal Act on Data Protection

¹The Fed­er­al Coun­cil may, hav­ing con­sul­ted the Com­mis­sion­er and be­fore a form­al en­act­ment comes in­to force, ap­prove the auto­mated pro­cessing of sens­it­ive per­son­al data or per­son­al­ity pro­files if:

a.

the tasks that re­quire such pro­cessing re­quired are reg­u­lated in a form­al en­act­ment;

b.

ad­equate meas­ures are taken to pre­vent breaches of pri­vacy;

c.

a test phase be­fore the form­al en­act­ment comes in­to force is in­dis­pens­able for the prac­tic­al im­ple­ment­a­tion of data pro­cessing.

²A test phase may be man­dat­ory for the prac­tic­al im­ple­ment­a­tion of data pro­cessing if:

a.

the ful­fil­ment of a task re­quires tech­nic­al in­nov­a­tions, the ef­fects of which must first be eval­u­ated;

b.

the ful­fil­ment of a task re­quires sig­ni­fic­ant or­gan­isa­tion­al or tech­nic­al meas­ures, the ef­fect­ive­ness of which must first be tested, in par­tic­u­lar in the case of co­oper­a­tion between fed­er­al and the can­ton­al bod­ies; or

c.

pro­cessing re­quires that sens­it­ive per­son­al data or per­son­al­ity pro­files be trans­mit­ted on­line to can­ton­al au­thor­it­ies.

³The Fed­er­al Coun­cil shall reg­u­late the mod­al­it­ies of auto­mated data pro­cessing in an or­din­ance.

⁴The com­pet­ent fed­er­al body shall provide the Fed­er­al Coun­cil with an eval­u­ation re­port at the latest with­in two years of the pi­lot sys­tem com­ing in­to op­er­a­tion. The re­port con­tains a pro­pos­al on wheth­er the pro­cessing should be con­tin­ued or ter­min­ated.

⁵Auto­mated data pro­cessing must be ter­min­ated in every case if with­in five years of the pi­lot sys­tems com­ing in­to op­er­a­tion no form­al en­act­ment has come in force that con­tains the re­quired leg­al basis.