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EU Allowed Facebook To Store Data In The US

The EU Commission has now formally stipulated that the data of European users in the USA is subject to a level of protection comparable to that in Germany. Accordingly, Facebook and Google are likely to push information across the Atlantic again.

For many years now, the dispute between data protection officials, Brussels politicians, the courts, and Internet companies has been raging. The latest status stated that data from European users may only be processed in the European data centers of the corporations since relocation to the USA would not offer comparable protection.

Well shared However, the EU Commission announced that this would change with the new “EU-US Data Privacy Framework”. This set of rules was drawn up by representatives of the EU and the USA and is intended to ensure that information from European users in data centers in the USA is also subject to special protection. A court set up specifically for this purpose is to monitor compliance with the regulations. EU citizens can contact this in case of doubt and the court has the power to order the deletion of user data.

Core problem stays

One core of the problem with data transmission has so far been that the US legislation of the Patriot Act granted the US secret services easy access to the user data stored by companies. It has now been agreed here that such access will be limited to what is absolutely necessary and proportionate.

A relatively similar agreement already existed with the “Privacy Shield”. In essence, little has changed compared to this one – in particular, the problem with the US secret services basically persists, and the new assurance of improved proportionality is unlikely to change anything about that.

“They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Just like ‘Privacy Shield’, the recent agreement is not based on substantive changes but on short-term political thinking,” commented Max Schrems in the new agreement. The data protection activist had overturned the predecessor in court at the time. From his point of view, the situation has even worsened. Because the USA primarily has to change the FISA 702 regulation, which enables access to the secret service, anyway. With the agreement that has now been reached, the EU Commission has given up the means to exert pressure on this process.