US, EU Reach Preliminary Deal on Data Privacy (wsj.com) 20
The U.S. and the European Union reached a preliminary deal to allow data about Europeans to be stored on U.S. soil, heading off a growing threat to thousands of companies' trans-Atlantic operations. From a report: The deal, announced Friday by President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, could if concluded resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. It also assuages concerns of companies including Meta and Alphabet's Google that were facing mounting legal challenges to data transfers that underpin some of their operations in Europe. An earlier deal regulating trans-Atlantic data flows was deemed illegal by the EU's top court in 2020. That ruling was the second time since 2015 that the EU's Court of Justice had deemed U.S. safeguards on Europeans' data to be insufficient. The court said the U.S. didn't provide EU citizens effective means to challenge U.S. government surveillance of their data. Mr. Biden and Ms. von der Leyen didn't provide details of how the new agreement would work and withstand legal challenges. At issue in the talks has been whether the U.S. could convince the EU -- and its top court -- with new administrative appeals mechanisms for Europeans, but without a change to U.S. law, which would require approval by Congress, people briefed on the talks have said in recent months. Officials and observers on both sides of the Atlantic expect any new agreement to be challenged in court again, raising uncertainty about how long Friday's deal will last.
Structurally at odds. (Score:2)
The privacy laws and regulations in the US and the EU are structurally at odds with each other. So good luck with this one.
The moment they find enough loopholes to sign some sort of treaty I'm fairly sure there will be a nice new list of lawsuits.
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Well stated. Europe has very consumer friendly strong PII / privacy laws. I don't see them caving to the weak privacy regulations of the US. It would be great if the US adapted stronger privacy laws but I don't see how that has a snowball's chance in hell given the strong corporate bribing, er, lobbying here.
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I don't see them caving to the weak privacy regulations of the US.
Given that that is exactly what was in the previous "safe haven" agreement, one can only expect it again, but with a different name. After that, it will again take years to challenge it in court.
you're kidding (Score:1)
Snowden shows the US cannot be trusted, at all, for our privacy.
The US attitude is to "surveil everything" - even illegally, because their arse headed idea is 'we can collect everything, but if we don't retrieve what we collected from storage it doesn't count as surveillance'.
the problem is that for the US to collect all the data it's 'not surveilling' there needs to be lack of privacy so they can collect it.
the Turbulent and Turmoil programs are perfect examples of the kind of backdooring/weaponisation of
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Correct me if I'm mistaken - isn't he in prison right now? I mean, this guy's "heroic" act landed him in the pokey, and I don't see masses filling the streets demanding his release. Opinions aside, Snowden's a convicted criminal, nothing more.
The rest of your post I didn't properly understand. Was it the beginnings of a screed against the evil US Government? Democracy is terrible - but it's also the best system we have for governance. I'
WRONG (Score:2)
The parent post is completely wrong on all points.
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Correct me if I'm mistaken - isn't he in prison right now?
You're mistaken.
Snowden was granted permanent residency in Russia in 2020.
Which, while close to a prison, isn't quite one.
Yet.
Re: you're kidding (Score:2)
I have the impression Americans are waiving this off to easily. In te EU, people no longer look up to the US. On the contrary.
Trump probably ment it differently, but it really is time to make America great again.
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No, Snowden is not in prison, but that is not relevant. He exposed facts about the US government spying well beyond anything needful or proper, regardless of his current fate.
And even if the US government is better than other governments, that doesn't mean that we can't criticize it when and where it is still bad. Privacy protection is one area in which the US Government very blatantly puts its own interests ahead of the good of its people, so we should call it out on that as loudly as possible. That is
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You are correct, the US cannot be trusted at all for our privacy. The only way an agreement like this is going to stick without having everyone's data segregated and processed separately by country will be if all data for all countries is kept in the most consumer-focused privacy areas.
Otherwise, non-US competitors will beat out the government-monitored US versions over time. People do care about privacy.
With the chip shortages (Score:3)
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"As other articles have pointed out there isn't enough storage on earth to have every country host all it's own data."
That logically doesn't make sense since if country A can't host it then probably neither can country B, C or D either. So who does, Martians?
Also I presume you've heard of tape?
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I'm not sure what you think this deal is, but if anything it should reduce the amount of data being stored.
At the moment US companies have to keep European's data in Europe. Except for the UK, post brexit we get screwed as much as they like.
With this deal it will be possible for US companies to instead store the data in the US, and Europeans will have their GDPR rights enforced there by some legal means. It's going to be interesting to see what that is.
Anyway, that means there can be more data de-duplicatio
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Sorry, but that's an insane load of nonsense.
How does WHERE the data is stored have anything at all to do with how much it is?
Unless you keep a copy in a place where it should not be stored, in which case you're breaking the law, so that should not be an issue to begin with.
This won't be done before chip shortage pass (Score:2)
This is the kind of stuff that takes years to implement. It's not going to cut over next month. This is something that will happen over years, which is enough time for the fabs to catch up.
GDPR (Score:2)
What about GDPR, the ubiquitous thing that trained us to always click Accept by reflex whenever we see a popup of any kind. Well done EU, teaching people to be like that.
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GDPR doesn't mandate popups but they're probably the most profitable way for websites to continue slurping and selling our data as usual. noyb is on he case and hopefully the EU is going to fix it within a couple of years.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/05... [techcrunch.com]
https://techcrunch.com/2021/06... [techcrunch.com]
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GDPR doesn't mandate popups but they're probably the most profitable way for websites to continue slurping and selling our data as usual. noyb is on he case and hopefully the EU is going to fix it within a couple of years.
This. I use Ublock Origin and Privacy Badger to defeat the cookies, and I Don't Care About Cookies to kill the warning. As much as the GDPR is a good thing, I don't trust companies who got fat off of raping our personal information to give up. The GDPR means that eventually, they can be punished.