The European Union’s top court has invalidated a key data-sharing protocol that allows American companies to transfer personal information about EU citizens to the US. The court says the regulation, known as Privacy Shield, is invalid as it does not protect EU citizens from mass surveillance programs operated by American intelligence agencies like the NSA.
The ruling in the case, known as Schrems II, after its original claimant, privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems, will have a profound effect on a range of US businesses, from banks to law firms. But it will be of particular concern to large tech companies like Facebook that handle large amounts of personal data. These firms need to ensure the protection of this data from mass surveillance programs, or change how and where they process it.
Given this, I don’t know why the US is always going on about China. On a purely anecdotal level I’ve seen far more articles about US spying on allies, US senators wanting backdoors into encryption, the US CLOUD Act, and regular vulnerabilities with Cisco and Microsoft software (I’ve posted about all of them). Maybe its just time we stopped pointing fingers at others. As I understand it, every country is spying on another country and that includes their own allies.
See EU strikes down key US data sharing protocol, citing threat of mass surveillance
#technology #security #EU
A clash between EU right to privacy and US desire for surveillance