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:I can see why they didn't investigate

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:At what point

[Poeli]

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.