<http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/privacy-shield-is-up-for-revie...> Privacy Shield, the transatlantic data transfer agreement now used by more than 2,000 companies, comes up for its first annual review in September. This week, data protection authorities are already emitting warning growls. The 2016 agreement is the replacement for the weak and muddled EU/US Safe Harbour principles that were declared inadequate by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in October 2015. [...] On Tuesday, the EU’s Article 29 Working Party (WP 29) – Europe’s data protection working group made up of national data protection supervisors and others – issued a statement outlining a letter it has sent to the commission. The WP 29 has an invited role in the review process and, as its letter makes clear, it intends to spend several days in the US soon on a fact-finding mission, talking to companies, US government representatives and civil society groups. Often shrugged off in the past for having more bark than bite, the WP 29 is now a far more influential group in the wake of those past ECJ rulings in which the justices essentially confirmed concerns the working group had stated for years. Now a weightier ethical watchdog, its contributory role in assessing Privacy Shield will make it a bellwether for indicating any serious problems. Spoiler alert: serious problems are expected. Not least as the group pointedly states that it reserves the right to issue its own independent report, in effect if it is not happy with the commission’s report or decisions. The WP 29 states several critical (and long-standing) areas of alarm in its letter to the commission, some already voiced in an opinion on the newly-minted Privacy Shield way back in pre-Trump era April 2016 (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/press-material/press-...). Post-Trump, some ill winds are blowing. In the Tuesday statement, the group flags an intention to examine both commercial and law enforcement/security access to, and management of, EU data. [...]