The Cloud and the Law

The EU's new Privacy Shield data protection rules will oblige many businesses to change their personal data processing habits

Europe's groundbreaking practices in this domain are not universally shared. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that information on European citizens stored on US servers was subject to surveillance illegal in the EU. European companies storing such data elsewhere could be breaking the new law. These changes require clear privacy policies and data anonymization in the form of encryption that renders such data unreadable in the event of a breach. Some large cloud services vendors have already adopted such measures, and it is hoped that others will follow Europe’s lead.