Dealing With EU’s New Data Laws

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA make it imperative for businesses storing customer data on the cloud to be aware of the EU’s new Privacy Shield Framework.

What does your company do with personal data? The age of networks, the internet, the cloud and industrial digitization have seen a huge rise in the collection, storage and transfer of data. Data privacy laws are also evolving, including a major new EU-wide change. For multinationals that share data between the EU and the US, the regulatory red tape just got much more complicated. In the rest of the world, the rules differ from country to country. But the EU is usually seen as a global model for good practice regarding the protection of personal data, and many countries will follow its lead.

Transatlantic Tussle

The EU is concerned about the creeping domination of US technology companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook that store EU citizens’ data in the US. The July 2016 Privacy Shield Framework replaced the Safe Harbor agreement, ruled invalid by the European Court of Justice in October 2015. The change has generated a transatlantic tussle over data sovereignty between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission.