Business May Be Disrupted By The Failure Of The EU And US To Reach Data Transfer Agreement

Businesstory ^ | Congaga

[Congaga]

For businesses and indeed customers these days the transfer of online data is vital to make things work as they should.

[SubMareener]

Beginning to look like a digital Smoot-Hawley Tariff situation. Anything that reduces international trade at this time could be the trigger of a Black Swan Event.

[MarchonDC09122009]

Glad you brought this up.
EU-US data “privacy shield” proposal is undergoing negotiations, with initial proposal looking uncertain that at this point.
EU countries do not trust that their country’s citizens data is safe from US gov’t intelligence acquisition and archiving, ever since the Snowden NSA revelations.

For more info follow daily developments at IAPP.org
Here’s more details as of 02/09/2016

http://www.politico.eu/article/the-phone-call-that-saved-safe-harbor-john-kerry-frans-timmermans/

(BTW: John Kerry did very little to resolve this issue. He is a powdered wig State dept figurehead)

[MarchonDC09122009]

Astute observation, and shared concern by many.
4000+ int’l businesses rely on EU-US PII PHI data sharing capabilities that up until now, were protected by Safe Harbor agreement.

I do doubt that gov’t on either side of the pond would ultimately allow and significant restrictions to be put into effect that might upset our collective house of cards economy.

[SubMareener]

You are definitely giving them too much credit for intelligence. ;-)

[MeganC]

For the convenience of everyone else here’s the blog post:

For businesses and indeed customers these days the transfer of online data is vital to make things work as they should. However the issue of international data transfer is a really complicated one. It was hoped that a new safe harbor between the EU and the US would make the issue easier to resolve and control.

However the expected agreement was not completed or even agreed to before the transfer deadline had come and gone. Business experts have warned that failure to reach agreement could have absolutely dire consequences in terms of the disruption that it will cause.

The deal was not reached in time as the EU Commission representatives were not convinced by the pledges that the US had made to protect the data of EU nationals. Although the talks are still ongoing the failure of the talks to meet the agreement deadline mean that there are many individuals and companies on both sides of the Atlantic that would trust the merits of any eventual agreement.

A new Transatlantic data transfer agreement is urgently required as the previous agreement was declared to be legally invalid by the European Court of Justice. The ruling was made as the judges believed that EU nationals had no protection if their data had its security compromised in the US.

Failure to reach agreement could have terrible consequences for two reasons. Firstly it could mean that the amount of Transatlantic online transactions could decline sharply as fewer EU citizens trust US companies with their data. Secondly with data transfers no longer been done for free, the cost of doing Transatlantic online business could increase prices sharply, further reducing the incentives to carry out such trades in the first place.