When European law reaches a Swiss website
Many Swiss businesses believe European law has no bearing on them because their server sits in Switzerland. The test has never been the server. It is the audience addressed.
Read this partWeb regulation / Switzerland
What Swiss law asks of a website
Switzerland is more permissive than the European Union on cookies, and stricter than people assume on personal liability. The four points below cover almost every case of a presentation site or an editorial site.
File verified on 27 July 2026.
Is a privacy policy required?
As soon as the site processes personal data, yes. And the threshold is low: a contact form is enough, an email address landing in a mailbox is enough, server logs recording IP addresses are enough.
The revised Federal Act on Data Protection has been in force since 1 September 2023. It requires the controller to inform the data subject, at the moment of collection, of its identity, the purpose of the processing and any recipients. A privacy page is the ordinary way to discharge that duty.
The widespread abbreviation « nLPD » referred to the revision bill. Since it came into force, the text is simply called the LPD, or FADP in English.
What details must appear on the site?
Art. 3 para. 1 let. s of the Unfair Competition Act targets anyone offering goods or services through electronic commerce. It requires them to state their identity and contact address clearly, including an email address, to explain the technical steps of an order, to provide a means of spotting and correcting input errors before submission, and to confirm the order electronically without delay.
A plain presentation site that sells nothing online falls outside that provision. Publishing your identity and a contact address anyway remains standard practice, and it is the first thing a visitor looks for when working out who they are dealing with.
Registration in the commercial register is a separate question. A sole proprietorship is only required to register from 100,000 francs of annual revenue. Below that, the absence of a register number is not an omission: there is nothing to publish.
Does the site have to be accessible?
The Disability Discrimination Act covers services provided by public bodies, undertakings holding an infrastructure or passenger transport concession, and certain private providers in listed sectors. The showcase site of an ordinary small business falls outside that scope, and no technical standard is imposed on it by that text.
That settles the question of obligation, not the question of interest. A site meeting the WCAG recommendations at level AA can be read from the keyboard, tolerates zooming, keeps its contrast and stays intelligible to a screen reader. Those same properties make it readable on a phone in sunlight and intelligible to a search engine.
A Swiss business addressing consumers in the European Union falls under a separate regime since 28 June 2025. That question is handled in the European part of this file.
What is actually at risk?
One Swiss peculiarity deserves to be known, because it is routinely left out. The fines provided for by the LPD, up to 250,000 francs, are criminal and fall on the responsible natural person, not on the company. The manager answers out of their own pocket.
Everyday disputes, however, lie elsewhere. The Commissioner opens investigations and issues recommendations, and it is forced remediation, bad press and lost time that cost, long before any fine.
Sources
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The three parts
The rest of the world, and the principle behind all of it
Around a hundred states now have personal data legislation. Listing them would serve no purpose. Understanding what they share does, because it lets you decide without seeking advice every time.
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