EU High Court To Review US-EU Data Safe Harbor Agreement

jfruh (300774) writes with news that a complaint in Irish Court against Facebook for possibly sharing personal data of EU citizens with the NSA has escalated to the European Court of Justice which will review the continuance of the U.S./EU Safe Harbor Framework in light of PRISM. Under European laws, personal data of EU citizens can't be transferred to countries that don't meet EU standards for data protection. The U.S. doesn't meet those standards, but American companies have worked around this by using EU standards for the data of European citizens, even that data stored on servers outside of Europe. Now the EU's highest court will decide if this workaround is good enough — especially in light of revelations of the NSA's Prism data-mining program.

Comments

Re:At what point

[Sique]

To what end? That means that they can't use the irish tax havens anymore. That means that they have no footing if they want to sue. That means that even mediocre european companies will eat their marketshare because they are present in the E.U.. And if the sales company in the E.U. sues them for falsely representing the actual handling of the data, they aren't off the hook either.

Yes, an U.S. based company could avoid the fallout. But is it worth it?