Personal data flows between countries as fast as dollars and euros. The current of personal data between US companies and European citizens was abruptly switched off after Europe’s top court killed a trans-Atlantic agreement that allows data to move between the European Union and the United States. This means that any transfer of information from EU citizens to US companies is now in legal limbo. Are you reading this on a mobile phone? Your browsing information is transferred to the US. Every time you type a message on your phone in Rome, the predictive keyboard transfers data to Google or Apple across the pond. Or say you wedge a Tesla through the narrow streets of Amsterdam — that data flies right over to the US. Without the legal framework of the Privacy Shield, all of these daily activities are technically illegal. What’s Next Companies have to rethink their data transfer and storage policies before they become outlaws. It won’t be easy. Any firm that collects and manages the data of European citizens must sift through their applications and storage policies, and storing data in European availability zones from US-based companies won’t be a workaround anymore. Tech titans like Google and Facebook are diving for loopholes, arguing that the ECJ left the system of standard contractual clauses (SCCs) in place, the section of the Privacy Shield that facilitates data transfer. But with the Privacy Shield down, the SCCs won’t help them export EU data, says Carlo Piana, who has been practicing IT law in Europe since 1995. What used to be fairly straightforward — like storing logs from a server in one of the many available EU data centers — won’t fly now. “It’s a lot more difficult to confine data from applications like speech recognition in mobile phones to Europe,” Carlo explains. While the court didn’t strike them down directly, the SCCs are only valid if they respect the same standards of protections granted by European laws. The trouble? Those same companies fall under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) jurisdiction, rendering SCCs invalid. Lawmakers are heading back to the drawing board. The US Chamber of Commerce is already in damage-control mode — see the letter they fired off — backed by thousands of companies urging governments to “develop a stable and sustainable mechanism for companies to transfer data between the European Union and the United States” or risk denting the $1.1 trillion in total trade in goods and services between the two. Continua su https://www.dataversity.net/the-privacy-shield-fell-now-what/ Giacomo