Turkey KVKK Compliance: Law No. 6698 and the 2024 Reforms

Turkish controllers above the announced thresholds (annual employee count above 50 or annual balance sheet above the announced threshold, or whose main activity is processing sensitive data) must register in VERBIS, the public Data Controllers Registry, before processing. Foreign controllers processing personal data in Turkey must register regardless of size and appoint a representative (a Turkish citizen or Turkey-established legal person) whose identity is filed in VERBIS. Registration describes purposes, categories, recipients, transfers, retention, and security measures. Unregistered processing is independently fineable, and VERBIS is public, competitors and complainants can check it.

Before March 2024, sensitive (special-category) data essentially required explicit consent or narrow statutory exceptions, health data could only be processed by persons under confidentiality obligations, which made ordinary HR and insurance workflows technically unlawful. Law No. 7499 introduced a GDPR-style condition list: explicit consent remains, joined by legal requirement, protection of life, public health, employment-law obligations, and other enumerated grounds. This regularized flows companies had been running on legal fictions, but it also removed the excuse: sensitive-data processing now needs a documented condition mapping, not a blanket consent form.

The old Article 9 permitted transfers only with explicit consent or to adequate countries (a list the Board never published) or with Board-approved undertakings, in practice a bottleneck that made most transfers formally non-compliant. Since June 2024, the amended regime allows: adequacy decisions (by country, sector, or international organization), appropriate safeguards, Turkish standard contractual clauses (published by the KVKK), binding corporate rules, written undertakings with Board approval, and derogations for occasional transfers. The operational catch: executed Turkish SCCs must be notified to the KVKK within 5 business days, and missing the filing carries its own administrative fine even if the transfer is substantively fine.

Complaint-driven and increasingly proactive. The Board publishes decision summaries and principle decisions; recurring themes are unlawful marketing messages (consent for electronic communications is co-enforced with the commercial-communications regime), data breaches (notification to the Board is required 'without delay,' interpreted as 72 hours by Board decision, plus affected-person notice), unregistered VERBIS status, and unlawful transfers. Fines sit in annually revalued bands (the upper administrative band has run into the tens of millions of lira after successive revaluations), and the Penal Code adds imprisonment exposure for unlawful recording, disclosure, or non-deletion, prosecutors do open such cases.

Closer than it used to be, but no. A GDPR program still needs: VERBIS registration and the local-representative appointment (no GDPR analogue since the EU representative plays a different role), Turkish-language notices meeting the KVKK's format guidance, explicit-consent mechanics for the flows where Turkish law still demands it (notably much of electronic marketing), the Turkish SCC filing workflow with its 5-day clock, and breach notification to the Board on its 72-hour practice. The 2024 amendments deliberately converged toward GDPR, the stated goal is EU accession-track alignment, so the direction of travel favors GDPR-based programs with a Turkish annex.