Documents Reveal Details of EU-US Privacy Shield Data Sharing Deal (betanews.com) 35
Mark Wilson writes: Details of the data sharing arrangements agreed between the US and EU earlier in the month have been revealed in newly published documents. The EU-US Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer agreement is set to replace the Safe Harbor that had previously been in place. The European Commission has released the full legal texts that will form the backbone of the data transfer framework. One of the aims is to 'restore trust in transatlantic data flows since the 2013 surveillance revelations,' and while privacy groups still take issue with the mechanism that will be in place, the agreement is widely expecting to be ratified by members of the EU.
Hey Euro-weenies..... (Score:5, Funny)
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Exactly this. The whole roaring whine about the EU "disintegrating" when confronted with one crisis is really disingenuous. The point is we EUsians don't trust our institutions, and that with reason[1]. Weasel words like restore trust in transatlantic data flows since the 2013 surveillance revelations don't make it better (that was irony, I swear).
No wonder people in the EU are voting populists everywhere (no, I don't think is the way to go, and I don't know whom I find more repugnant: those populists or th
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The sad thing is that some people decide to vote for nationalistic parties, which are not the solution to the low regard to human rights and especially to equality. In addition right wingers are only able to say what they do not want, but they never say how they want to solve any crisis (except for statement pointing out that the problem can be solved by making it the problem of some else, for example Greece).
What we have to do it make a large step towards democracy and make clear to "elites" that this is a
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I assume the point the AC was trying to make was that if you'd visited certain parts of Europe a few years ago, what was happening might not have been war in the tanks and RPGs sense, but the aftermath looked disturbingly similar. We literally had rioting in the streets, and not just in Greece. In some places law and order lost effective control for a while, and in some places the people lost effective control of their governments for a while.
The fact that these things could happen in supposedly civilised f
I smell a loophole (Score:4, Interesting)
"The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is a tremendous victory for privacy, individuals, and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. We have spent more than two years constructing a modernized and comprehensive framework that addresses the concerns of the European Court of Justice and protects privacy."
So what's it really like in there? Any lawyers around able to make heads or tails of it enough to find just how much it'll erode the privacy it supposedly protects?
Because I trust these people about as far as I can throw the sun.
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This thing exists so that corporations can do what European privacy laws would otherwise forbid them to do. Stupidly it creates an incentive to move data processing to the US and US companies, because European companies handling the same data are bound by stricter laws, so they can't compete with companies in countries with lax privacy laws. This "deal" is like making domestic companies produce only flame retardant insulation, but allow anyone to sell imported insulation that isn't flame retardant.
Re:I smell a loophole (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at it from the other side as well (Score:5, Interesting)
This kind of arrangement also means that small European businesses can legally use US-based services to do useful things where there aren't any equivalent EU-based services. As someone running small European businesses, I can tell you first hand that this is the situation all too often. I'd be happy to use equivalent home-grown services instead, but sometimes we just don't have them.
For example, I have a business that sells stuff online. It probably wouldn't have been commercially viable to get it up and running without US-based payment processing services. Imagine what would happen if every small business in a similar position had to close, how many people would lose their jobs, how many products and services wouldn't be delivered to customers who want them.
I'm all for making sensible long-term policy, I'm all for promoting European entrepreneurship, and I'm all for protecting privacy and personal data. These are all good things, and concerns about how national governments and security services use that data are reasonable. But there are a lot of other people trying to get at that data as well, and allowing international services while still protecting EU citizens from having advertisers and insurers and credit agencies and all the rest getting hold of data on them just because some European business they dealt with happened to use US services is a good thing too.
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I'd be happy to use equivalent home-grown services instead, but sometimes we just don't have them.
And now you know why. How can anyone expect home-grown services if their potential customers are allowed to violate European law by sending the data to foreign corporations? Does that pattern look familiar? Yes, it's offshoring: The US is to the EU like China is to the US (and the EU, of course), except with regard to privacy protection instead of environmental protection. This, btw, is how privacy dies: on the altar of economic development. Not only are we getting these ridiculously named workarounds ("pri
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We don't have native European versions of these services because tech investment in places like Silicon Valley is orders of magnitude greater than in comparable start-ups almost anywhere in Europe. This is a well-known problem, with implications far wider than just privacy.
The fact remains that some of those US businesses, having established themselves at home first, have then spent years dealing with regulations in other places including the EU so they can operate here as well. Again, this often covers are
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So we're supposed to ignore our laws just so you can use American businesses to handle your customers' data instead of creating demand for similar but legal services in the EU?
There has been demand for similar services in Europe for as long as in the US. They built them. We didn't.
These illegal treaties, "Safe Harbor" and now "Privacy Shield", make sure that there never will be alternatives to the privacy invading companies you use to make a buck while selling out your customers.
European businesses weren't offering alternatives anyway.
EU businesses still need to obey the law that US businesses get to shirk, so they are at a competitive disadvantage.
This is fundamentally wrong on two counts.
Firstly, the whole point of these schemes is to require US companies to comply with the same data protection standards as EU companies, and thus allow trade between them without compromising personal data. Aside from the governmental intrusion issue, the system has been reasonably successful in this respec
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They just don't go as far as you'd like
It's not a matter of what I like. These treaties are ILLEGAL. Politicians push them through anyway, because they can't be held responsible, and when one treaty is put down by a court of law, they have the equally illegal successor ready to replace it. It's corruption, plain and simple.
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It's not a matter of what I like.
Yes, it is. A lot of people are fearful of threats like terrorism, and support their governments in taking these kinds of measures. Most countries' data protection rules, in Europe as well as the US, admit various exceptions in relation to national security and the like. You don't have to like it. For that matter, neither do I. But the issue is not nearly as one-sided as you're making out.
These treaties are ILLEGAL.
It's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems w
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As I said, it's difficult to have a constructive discussion if you don't understand how international agreements or legal systems work. Evidently you also don't understand either what the relevant European court ruling actually said or what the European data protection rules actually are, nor do you seem to have any interest in either developing your understanding or discussing useful alternative ways to deal with the problem, so I think we're done here.
Re: I smell a loophole (Score:4, Interesting)
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For example: as soon as someone yells "terrorist" all rules and limitations go overboard.
The trouble is, that is a cultural problem, and it's common to both the US and the EU. The average MP or MEP or US Representative has little power to affect it directly, and probably in reality neither do European courts. A trade agreement just isn't big enough to change the now-established rules of the game, so you might as well write the trade agreements to do as much good as you can. In this context, that probably means preventing commercial exploitation of European citizens' data to the same standards a
Liberate the US (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an EU citizen and I'm tired of the US invading our privacy. The only real solution is to send our militaries across the Atlantic to free the Americans from their corrupt government. If we really want privacy, we need to go to war with the US. It's the only solution. Without war, the US won't take the EU seriously.
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I'm an EU citizen and I'm tired of the US invading our privacy. The only real solution is to...
Unless the end of that sentence is "hold your own government accountable for its corruption", you haven't thought about it very hard.
I know (hope!) that you were being facetious about going to war, but I hope you realize that you're better off trying to clean up your own government first. A good start is to start blaming your "representatives" for their actions instead of letting them off the hook every time they start bleating about the Americans.
Newsless news (Score:2)