EU parliament calls for Privacy Shield to be pulled until US complies

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/05/eu-parliament-calls-for-privacy-shield-to-be-pulled-until-us-complies/

by Sami_Lehtinen • 8 years ago

130 84 8 years ago

guitarbill• 8 years ago

Max Schrems is great, and the hero we need. But I’ll believe it when I see it, that the EU parliament dares to vote against such massive business interest. GDPR was one thing, this is a totally different level.

akie• 8 years ago

But... they already voted on this.

From the article: (the EU parliament) "takes the view that the current #PrivacyShield arrangement does not provide the adequate level of protection", "calls therefore on the Commission to suspend the Privacy Shield until the US authorities comply" https://twitter.com/bendrath/status/1014832868969910273?ref_...

Angostura4• 8 years ago

Yes. I really wouldn't like to be the Commission facing this one at the moment, particularly since the current US administration will presumably see this as related to the larger international trade-war.

My personal opinion is that this isn't tradewar politicing by Europe, it's the result of a genuine interest in citizen's privacy, but I can see why it could be taken as such.

azernik2• 8 years ago

This is not a binding vote; however, it does indicate an avenue for more hardball action (specifically, giving a deadline by which it will consider the Commission non-compliant with GDPR unless it takes action).

simonh3• 8 years ago

Massive US business interests. Why should the EU parliament care about that?

There's an obvious solution for Facebook et al. Host their primary data centers in the EU and move their US user data there, instead of vice versa.

beberlei• 8 years ago

If privacy shield gets scraped, then I might have to switch my European business to use only European third party services. At our company we use a carefully selected number of U.S. services that we believe have the interest of their customers and data at heart, but without privacy shield we might not be allowed to use them.

The massive downside for me as EU business:

1. Lost time and money having to migrate. 2. Usually european companies providing the same service are worse, leaving me and my customers worse off.

michaelt• 8 years ago

  Why should the EU parliament care about that?

Plenty of EU business interests use AWS and Gmail.

Silhouette7• 8 years ago

Why should the EU parliament care about that?

Because many thousands if not millions of smaller businesses across the EU depend on US businesses as well, and sharing some sort of personal data with them is often necessary for the provision of the relevant service.

Given the hassle and costs we've all just had with GDPR, the EU going all-in on undermining Privacy Shield would not be a welcome development for businesses.

lumberjack• 8 years ago

They are not business interests within the EU.

mehrdadn3• 8 years ago

Kind of a tangent (secant?), and this is a rather broad discussion topic, but is anybody else also worried that the EU is going to lose some of its teeth with Brexit and such coming up? I'm wondering how all these regulations will play out in the next few years if members decide the EU isn't serving their interests. Will serious enforcement take place, or not? Because if not, it seems likely to me that companies might try to "wait it out" and avoid full compliance with regulation for a while, to see what happens.

ealexhudson• 8 years ago

No; if anything, they will gain teeth. For many years, the UK has been a strong influence in a variety of directions (pro-swpat, for example, but often anti-regulation), many of which were not well-aligned with their continental cousins.

The EU27 are better aligned without the UK, and will move forwards more quickly in many areas the UK would have held them back. Ongoing integration is very much still the plan.

In the meantime, the UK will have to stay very close to EU rules in order to continue to trade with its largest market. However, it already has little/no say in future rules, and that will stop altogether in March.

mehrdadn3• 8 years ago

Thanks! But note that by teeth I meant the ability to enforce, not the ability to legislate. I expect the more countries leave or lose interest, the easier it is to legislate, but the less leverage they have for actual enforcement, so I'm wondering how that balances out.

zavi• 8 years ago

Place your bets: how many years til EU kicks Fb/Google/Amazon out of Europe?

jarfil3• 8 years ago

260, give or take some.

The EU has no interest in kicking anyone out, for as long as they pay taxes in the EU.

pluma8• 8 years ago

Well, this was completely predictable. Privacy Shield seemed extremely flaky considering how suddenly Safe Harbor was shot down. I hope most European companies were smart enough to drop hard dependencies on US companies for privacy relevant data during their GDPR audits.

wemdyjreichert• 8 years ago

This is, yet again, the EU trying to legislate for the whole world.

hluska• 8 years ago

How can cancelling an agreement with one other nation be considered legislating the whole world?

mark_edward• 8 years ago

Look at it with the eyes of a whiny american who doesn't understand what a treaty is.

foepys• 8 years ago

Well, considering the US is invading and bombing counties all over the world for various reasons, the EU way is a bit less aggressive, don't you think?

I also never understood why Americans think that is bad. The EU is making their market less attractive, so shouldn't Americans be happy about that?

pitaj2• 8 years ago

I'm not happy when the liberty and quality of life of foreigners is damaged.

kodablah2• 8 years ago

The parliament is also calling for “evidence and legally binding commitments” to ensure that data collection under FISA Section 702 is not “indiscriminate

Ha...this I doubt will ever be provided. And if it is provided, will it be seen by the citizenry? They're either going to have to cave on the "no indiscriminate collection" requirement, accept an invalid definition of "indiscriminate" or "collection", or flat never re-agree to the agreement. Because, sadly, indiscriminate collection of data isn't stopping.

stickfigure• 8 years ago

I don't see how this can possibly end well.

I live in the US; I have many friends in Europe; how exactly is Facebook/Google/etc going to separate our data geographically while still displaying it in our feeds/inboxes/etc?

There really seems to be only one realistic endgame: The end of the multinational corporation. Pick a jurisdiction, keep your servers & employees inside, and tell the rest of the world to get soaked. If Europe really wants to control their citizen's data, they're going to have to start firewalling, China-style.

I'm guessing privacy advocates imagine the world will homogenize on a set of Euro-compatible policies and everyone will live happily ever after? That seems far less likely than a set of mutually-incompatible enforcement regimes, like we already see with China and Russia.

So what does Facebook/Google do? Disallow friending/email/communication across political boundaries?

tareqak2• 8 years ago

There is another endgame that I will concede is considerably less likely to happen, but I will maintain remains possible: the end of the modern-day nation-state.

My evidence for this claim? Very few nation-states if any are growing as fast (in terms of net worth) as the largest multinationals, but the multinationals are still relatively agile (read as able to mobilize their strength behind a common agenda). Sure at the moment, the largest multinationals have only as much net worth as some of the poorest countries. However, look at how cities and states try to out compete each other in order to have companies like Amazon and Foxconn set up their headquarters. How soon will it be until countries start competing with each other for something similar (building your next regional data center in EMEA? here are the contenders). If the multinationals really wanted to milk it, then they could totally make a game show out of it à la Eurovision.

supercanuck• 8 years ago

then who would monopolize violence in that scenario? What stopping us from a might is right type world?

slededit• 8 years ago

Have the client weave them together. Sever A says extra data is on server B and the UI sends another request.

This is easily solvable - and certainly far easier than splitting up the corporation. At worst some features don't get made.

EU parliament calls for Privacy Shield to be pulled until US complies

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