The EU Commission is in the process of eliminating major legal uncertainty for data processing companies in the USA and Europe. With the draft of the so-called adequacy decision for intercontinental data transfers published on Tuesday, companies would again be allowed to send data back and forth between the USA and Germany without major restrictions.
The background is a decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the so-called “Schrems II” ruling in 2020, he decided that such a data transfer is illegal because the USA allows its secret services to spy on data from EU citizens largely without cause. Companies that still wanted to send data had to use complicated standard contractual clauses to do so.
For companies, especially large data collectors and users such as the platforms Facebook and Instagram, which belong to the meta group, the verdict was a serious problem – so serious that they announced to switch off the offers in Europeunless something happens soon.
Something happened now. US President Joe Biden decreed in October that the data of EU citizens should be at least a little better protected in the future. The EU Commission is now using this concession to restore the old status quo through a kind of decree. The European data protection supervisory authority still has to comment on the draft published today, followed by the member states. Critics, such as the NOYB organization run by Austrian data protection officer Max Schrems, nevertheless assume that the EU Commission’s decision will come into force in spring 2023.
It is taken for granted that this regulation will also end up before the ECJ again. The news website political According to Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders, he estimates the chances that the new “Privacy Shield” may stay this time, to 70 to 80 percent. The NOYB data protection officers, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the new decree by US President Joe Biden does not eliminate the basic problem of the secret services accessing the data. They therefore assume that EU citizens will only have temporary legal certainty again – until the next ruling by the EU court.