Documents Reveal Details of EU-US Privacy Shield Data Sharing Deal (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Details of the data sharing arrangements agreed between the US and EU earlier in the month have been revealed in newly published documents. The EU-US Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer agreement is set to replace the Safe Harbor that had previously been in place. The European Commission has released the full legal texts that will form the backbone of the data transfer framework. One of the aims is to 'restore trust in transatlantic data flows since the 2013 surveillance revelations,' and while privacy groups still take issue with the mechanism that will be in place, the agreement is widely expecting to be ratified by members of the EU.

Comments

Hey Euro-weenies.....

[bazmail]

....you can trust us again. Honest. lol!

Re:Hey Euro-weenies.....

[prefec2]

The sad thing is that some people decide to vote for nationalistic parties, which are not the solution to the low regard to human rights and especially to equality. In addition right wingers are only able to say what they do not want, but they never say how they want to solve any crisis (except for statement pointing out that the problem can be solved by making it the problem of some else, for example Greece).

What we have to do it make a large step towards democracy and make clear to "elites" that this is all our country/countries. Anyway, we can sue again regarding the new treaty and we should keep up the fight against TTIP, TiSA, and CETA.

Re:Hey Euro-weenies.....

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I assume the point the AC was trying to make was that if you'd visited certain parts of Europe a few years ago, what was happening might not have been war in the tanks and RPGs sense, but the aftermath looked disturbingly similar. We literally had rioting in the streets, and not just in Greece. In some places law and order lost effective control for a while, and in some places the people lost effective control of their governments for a while.

The fact that these things could happen in supposedly civilised first-world democracies is quite scary if you think about it. Many of us don't think our governments or political systems or electoral mechanics are perfect, often with good cause, but we tend to take a lot for granted and those days were a very clear reminder of how fast things could fall apart if we switched effective government off.

I smell a loophole

[Anonymous Coward]

"The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is a tremendous victory for privacy, individuals, and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. We have spent more than two years constructing a modernized and comprehensive framework that addresses the concerns of the European Court of Justice and protects privacy."

So what's it really like in there? Any lawyers around able to make heads or tails of it enough to find just how much it'll erode the privacy it supposedly protects?
Because I trust these people about as far as I can throw the sun.

Re:I smell a loophole

[Sique]

It's just a band aid for a patch for a prothesis. Basicly it gives pause until the next lawsuit also invalidates Privacy Shield. The reason why Safe Harbor was deemed illegal was that European citizens had no legal standing when their data was requested from U.S. companies by the U.S. government. Privacy Shield now gives European citizens a pro forma legal standing, but now any U.S. governmental organization can deny the actual case going to court. I doubt that this will suffice in the eyes of the European Court.

Re: I smell a loophole

[nachtelfjeiu]

I heard an analysis from a Dutch lawyer on the radio. Basically it's a swiss cheese of holes. For example: as soon as someone yells "terrorist" all rules and limitations go overboard. Besides, the whole FBI vs Apple thing makes it blatantly obvious where they stand on privacy. They want everything to be inherently insecure and accessible to them.

Re: I smell a loophole

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

For example: as soon as someone yells "terrorist" all rules and limitations go overboard.

The trouble is, that is a cultural problem, and it's common to both the US and the EU. The average MP or MEP or US Representative has little power to affect it directly, and probably in reality neither do European courts. A trade agreement just isn't big enough to change the now-established rules of the game, so you might as well write the trade agreements to do as much good as you can. In this context, that probably means preventing commercial exploitation of European citizens' data to the same standards as in Europe even if the data is exported to the US.

By all means advocate for stronger privacy protections or more limited government powers as well if that's what you believe in. But in the current political climate, I think you'll need a lot more than an argument about data sharing between allied nations to convince the Powers That Be to stop their mass surveillance programmes, and for better or worse, that's probably true regardless of anything the law actually says on either side of the Atlantic.

Liberate the US

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an EU citizen and I'm tired of the US invading our privacy. The only real solution is to send our militaries across the Atlantic to free the Americans from their corrupt government. If we really want privacy, we need to go to war with the US. It's the only solution. Without war, the US won't take the EU seriously.

Re:Liberate the US

[currently_awake]

You'd be attacking the wrong government. Your government is the one that is supposed to protect your privacy. If it doesn't then replace it.

Look at it from the other side as well

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This kind of arrangement also means that small European businesses can legally use US-based services to do useful things where there aren't any equivalent EU-based services. As someone running small European businesses, I can tell you first hand that this is the situation all too often. I'd be happy to use equivalent home-grown services instead, but sometimes we just don't have them.

For example, I have a business that sells stuff online. It probably wouldn't have been commercially viable to get it up and running without US-based payment processing services. Imagine what would happen if every small business in a similar position had to close, how many people would lose their jobs, how many products and services wouldn't be delivered to customers who want them.

I'm all for making sensible long-term policy, I'm all for promoting European entrepreneurship, and I'm all for protecting privacy and personal data. These are all good things, and concerns about how national governments and security services use that data are reasonable. But there are a lot of other people trying to get at that data as well, and allowing international services while still protecting EU citizens from having advertisers and insurers and credit agencies and all the rest getting hold of data on them just because some European business they dealt with happened to use US services is a good thing too.

Re:Look at it from the other side as well

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We don't have native European versions of these services because tech investment in places like Silicon Valley is orders of magnitude greater than in comparable start-ups almost anywhere in Europe. This is a well-known problem, with implications far wider than just privacy.

The fact remains that some of those US businesses, having established themselves at home first, have then spent years dealing with regulations in other places including the EU so they can operate here as well. Again, this often covers areas like financial or health regulation, not just privacy.

Now those services are here, and in some cases there is no indication that anyone closer to home is even trying to enter those spaces, so any native European alternative solution is surely several years away at a minimum. In the meantime, should we just stop things like selling anything to Europeans on the Internet, and close down the many thousands of smaller businesses across Europe that depend on some of these services?

I admire your principled stand, really, but politics and regulation are pragmatic fields. You can't win the war overnight, but that doesn't mean you stop fighting the battles you can win in the meantime, and it doesn't mean you adopt a scorched earth policy.