Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by Unknown on from the unsafe-harbor dept.

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.

4 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. I can see why they didn't investigate by timrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The decision by the Irish DPC not to investigate makes perfect sense - this case is essentially all politics, and nothing more. The finding is inevitably going to be that the existence of the NSA violates European data privacy laws, but there really isn't a whole lot the EU could do about it - they can't tell the US to shut down the NSA, and they can't revoke the ability of non-EU servers to host EU data without effectively creating a second Great Firewall. Nothing can ultimately be done about it, and so the only real result would be this "Europe-v-Facebook" group scoring some political points.

    1. Re:I can see why they didn't investigate by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Informative

      They could fine Facebook until they hosted European data in Europe. If they refused they could seize their assets, and deny them revenue from European companies. The end result being that facebook and other companies like them would go screaming mad to congress. So yes, there's plenty that could be done.

  2. Re:At what point by Sique · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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?

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  3. Re:At what point by Poeli · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And leave behind a 500M people market? Abandon all their current contract and cloud services? I don't think so. The EU is the second biggest market after China.

    Even if they do, several European companies will quickly fill the void (like in China) and the USA based companies will have an extra couple of competitors in the world.