The EU-US privacy shield was coined on 12th July 2016. The platform was aimed at enhancing the free flow of EU users’ data to companies within the US.
EU-US privacy shield is a transatlantic platform for monitoring data transfers between the EU and the US.
The EU issued some complaints about cross-border data protection. The complaints were a result of several legal uncertainties suspected by both parties.
Over recent months, the outcome of the legal uncertainty on data transfer has led the EU data protection agencies to raise eyebrows in suspicions over protected data.
The agencies started issuing orders on top-secret dataflow streaming through online platforms like Google Analytics, Google Fonts, and Stripe.
The major concern of the EU is to stop data flow to third countries, which could pose a great risk.
Europe’s leading data protection regulator has slammed the region’s data protection authorities (DPAs), challenging them over their competency.
More so, the original complaint that led to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) emphasized Facebooks’s use of a data transmission approach called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC).
The SCC mechanism authorizes every EU user’s data before moving it to the US for further processing.
The Facebook data operations were advised to take a momentary seizure corresponding to the US massive surveillance program. The complainant Mark Schrems proposed this advice to the Irish Data Protection Commission(DPC).
The whole issue took a detour and was aggrandized when the DPC went to court to expose more concerns over the legality of the data transmission between the EU and the US.
The action posed by the Irish DPC led to the court halting all operations of data transfers between both parties and affecting the privacy shield.
The decision taken by the court strips the US of any autonomy over the control of data transfers. However, Facebook still uses SCC to regulate and process the EU’s data transfer.
A new Legal Agreement?
Following the ruckus that went on over data handling and transfer, it sprouted a new legal agreement.
In a recent report, the European Union evades the pronouncement of a fixed date for concluding a new EU-US data transfer agreement.
The justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, suggested that placement for the privacy shield can be generated by the end of the year.
The commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the US president, Joe Biden, reiterated the EU-US data transfer possibility.
In a pre-recorded session at the IAPP conference in Washington, D.C., he assured the representatives that, “ It is difficult to give a precise timeline at this stage but we expect that this process could be finalized by the end of the year.”
The agreement is ending on an indecisive note. Companies like Facebook, waiting for a final decision, maybe on the edge of a data transfer suspension.
Photo by European Council President from Flickr