Europe is the home of data protection and of people who are aware of it. The United States is different. The legislation here is much more disparate and in many cases it lags behind European data protection legislation. This has been a problem for companies for years.
Data protection provisions that were anchored in the EU-US Privacy Shield have been declared invalid. Not because of concerns about the agreement as such, but because US laws like the FISA allow mass surveillance and Europeans have no legal standing in some courts. And so we arrive at the news, put out last week in the horse latitudes of summer via joint press statement, that the EU’s executive body and the US Department of Commerce have begun talks toward fashioning a shiny new Privacy Shield.
Stop The EU-US Data Transfer
That would mean that personal data of EU citizens will not be processed, transferred or stored in the USA. Here we are not talking about EU customers, but about EU citizens. A not entirely unimportant difference when companies work with EU citizens as employees or contractors or have concluded business agreements. Even then, if you restrict the cross border data transfer, the whole thing can get arbitrarily complicated. Since the definition of what falls under the current definition of personal data is also constantly changing.
Privacy Shield has been repealed for the EU. No documentation on a Privacy Shield has been published. Right now, this option is probably not a bad way to go. If only because it is not that easy to part with the Privacy Shield. Privacy Shield still stipulates that those who have certified themselves in accordance with these requirements.
Why Has Privacy Shield Been Overturned?
The FISA executive order and Presidential Policy Directive call the validity of data protection agreements into question. FISA is a kind of secret court system for dealing with terrorists and agents of foreign powers and is constantly updated. Executive order in turn, urges federal authorities to support the CIA with information retrieval.
