Brussels announced on Monday July 10 that it had adopted a new legal framework to allow the transfer of personal data from the European Union to the United States, crucial for the digital economy, after European court decisions invalidated the previous devices.
“The new European Union-United States framework for the protection of personal data will guarantee the security of data flows for Europeans and will provide legal certainty to companies on both sides of the Atlantic,” said the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in a statement.
Previous disabled devices
The two schemes previously put in place to allow companies to transfer such data from Europeans to the US were invalidated due to fears of surveillance by US intelligence services, the latest, “Privacy Shield “, in 2020.
These appeals to the Court of Justice of the European Union were brought by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems. This Monday, July 10, he announced to take legal action again, considering that the new text did not bring any improvement in terms of the protection of the personal data of Europeans.
“We already have options in the drawers for a new remedy, although we are tired of this game of legal ping-pong. We hope that the case will be back before the Court of Justice early next year,” he said in a statement.
Ursula von der Leyen and the US president, Joe Biden, had reached an agreement in principle in March 2022 on a new legal provision, which would supposedly respond to the concerns expressed by the courts.
additional safeguards
Adopted under this agreement, the new legal framework provides additional guarantees so that access by US intelligence agencies, in the name of national security, to data collected in Europe and transferred or hosted across the Atlantic, is limited. to what is “necessary” and “provided”.
It also opens up a possibility of redress for European citizens if they believe that their personal data has been illegally collected by US intelligence, allowing them to obtain, if necessary, the deletion or correction of this data.
Digital companies have welcomed this announcement. This is “good news for the thousands of companies, large and small, that move data across the Atlantic every day. Data flows are the basis of Europe’s service exports. EU to the US, which amounts to €1 billion a year, and this decision will give companies more confidence to carry out their activities and contribute to the growth of our economies,” said Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, CEO of DigitalEurope, the industry lobby.
Source: BFM TV
