Love him or hate him, it turns out that Edward Snowden’s leaks were at the root of the EU Court of Justice’s irreversible ruling that because, based on the leaked materials, the US law does not provide sufficient safeguards for individual privacy, EU customer data cannot be transferred to databases located on servers in the US.
An excellent and detailed article on WIRED’s website provides the details:
A RULING BY the Europe Union’s highest court today may create enormous headaches for US tech companies like Google and Facebook. But it could also provide more robust privacy protections for European citizens. And they all have Edward Snowden to thank—or blame.
Up until now, these companies have been able to transfer data they collect from users in the European Union to servers in the US, a practice made possible by the EU’s executive branch’s so-called “Safe Harbor Decision” in 2000. Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the Safe Harbor Decision was invalid. The ruling cannot be appealed.
Now tech companies have to figure out what the ruling means. Facebook and other companies haven’t been found guilty of any wrongdoing. But quashing the Safe Harbor Decision could open the floodgates to privacy investigations and lawsuits.
Where does Snowden fit in?
The Safe Harbor Decision held that the US provided adequate safeguards for personal information and that no company transferring data from the EU to the US would be prosecuted for doing so. That determination was overruled today as a result of a legal complaint filed against Facebook in Ireland by Austrian activist Maximillian Schrems. Schrems argued that, based on information about the National Security Agency’s practices leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, the US does not actually provide sufficient protection of private data and that Facebook therefore acted illegally by transferring his private data to its servers in the US.
This ruling will undoubtedly create some complex headaches for companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and likely even Amazon, as they will be forced to segregate their data storage for customers in the EU to be located on servers within the EU, which is a bit of a technical challenge, if not quite a nightmare. Many companies automatically replicate their data to various locations around the world both for service performance and data redundancy for mitigating downtime and data loss due to individual server failures.
There are more details on the decision and what it means for online service companies in the detailed article on the WIRED website.
Source: WIRED.com – “Tech Companies Can Blame Snowden for Data Privacy Decision“
Featured Photo Credit: PLATON