That is an interesting and possibly realistic take on the EU motives.
I can tell you from personal experience that although EU citizens have little problem tolerating their socialist government monitoring them from womb-to-tomb, they voice great disgust at the idea of any private companies profiting off of their personal data without their permission. They are ahead of us on objecting to data brokers exploiting personal information without explicit informed consent for each transfer, and to retain the right to be forgotten, ie: purged from facebook & google databases.
Update: Int’l phone conference with actual individual who wrote and brokered US - EU Safe Harbor agreement said no one is aware of a Safe Harbor 2.0 agreement at this time.
Many thousands of US companies are affected by this, and both gov’t and corp legal council are trying to figure out where to go from here, now that the EU to US data transfer agreements have been ruled invalid.
One thing’s for sure - this is a great business opportunity for data protection specialist attorneys, data classification and cloud data privacy solution providers.
Since I actually live and work over here, and have since 1988 - I fell rather qualified to speak to this.
EU Citizens only object when a US Company is involved - they have ZERO problem with clauses that state quite clearly that the data they provide *could* be processed, maintained, etc in a foreign country. They have NO problem with using EC Debit cards for all their transactions - data which is then aggregated and sold - they have NO problem with using Store Loyalty Cards which are used to record every item purchased which in turn are used to create profiles that are then sold. They have no problem with European Versions of Facebook (which die quickly :D) & Co. which use the EXACT same business model.
I could continue for quite a while - but, as always with the EU - it is all about the money! Since the money making was occurring outside the EU, it was difficult for them to tax these companies in a profitable fashion - now they have a vehicle to do so.