Stefan Mileschin

It can be trusted with Euro data

Despite the European Union's highest court twice declaring that the United States does not offer sufficient protection for Europeans' data from American national security agencies, the social media giant's lawyers continue to disagree.

Facebook was desperate to save cash by shipping European personal data to its data centres in the US. It was so certain that US spooks would not use the data to spy on European citizens, that it has made a legal argument to require the EU allow the US a safe harbour under its data protection laws.

This view has been consistently denied by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which struck down a U.S.-EU data transfer instrument called Privacy Shield. The court concluded Washington did not offer adequate protection for EU data shipped overseas because US surveillance law was too intrusive for European standards.

In the same landmark ruling, the Luxembourg-based court upheld the legality of another instrument used to export data out of Europe called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs). But it cast doubt on whether these complex legal instruments could be used to shuttle data to countries where EU standards cannot be met, including the US.

The CJEU reached a similar conclusion in 2015, striking down the predecessor agreement to Privacy Shield because of U.S. surveillance law and practices. In both rulings, Europe's top judges categorically stated Washington did not have sufficiently high privacy standards. Still, Facebook -- the company at the heart of both cases -- thinks it shouldn't follow the court's reasoning. Because America is the land of the free and it should be allowed to do what it likes.

https://fudzilla.com/news/54079-face...ata-protection