How does the data protection agreement between the US and Europe affect?
The European Commission and the United States government have reached an agreement in principle to be able to resume the transfer of data, guaranteeing the protection and privacy of the information. With the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation, the transfer of data of European citizens outside the European Union has caused uncertainty among citizens.
Joe Biden, President of the United States, advanced information on the agreement, pointing out that the European Commission has agreed in general terms, therefore we will still have to wait how this agreement is translated into a legal text and what consequences it will have on data protection and the privacy of European citizens.
Relations on the subject between the United States and the European Union began when the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the so-called Privacy Shield, a framework for the exchange of personal data from the European Union to the United States, which was in force for three years, and to which almost 3,500 companies had accepted, among which are the most important in the world such as: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Twitter.
The ruling made it clear that these large technology companies did not transfer and use the strictly necessary data, and once processed in the US, the appropriate protection standards were not applied from the ethical and legal point of view of the EU. Since then, there has been a framework of uncertainty regarding data protection, which has caused multiple problems between the EU and the large technology platforms.
President Biden added that the US and the EU are finding creative new approaches to bring their economies and cultures closer together based on shared values. The agreement on data privacy between the US and the EU is a relief for global organizations, and especially for the different companies that transfer data from the EU to the US and who harbored doubts about the implications of doing so following the 2020 EU Court ruling.
It will also be seen as positive news for US tech companies, which are battling a growing number of court cases involving European privacy regulators, and because the issue threatened to force organizations to cut off transatlantic data flows.