THE EUROPEAN Union and America beget reached a deal on data protection. The “EU-US Privacy Shield” allows companies to store Europeans’ personal data on American computers. This ends a three-month hiatus since the European Court of Justice struck down the preceding agreement,secure Harbour”, on the grounds that it gave inadequate protection against snooping by American spy agencies. Failure to reach a deal could beget sparked a damaging legal spat, or in which some European national data protection agencies could beget ruled illegal all transfers of data across the Atlantic.
A transatlantic gulf separates ideas about data privacy: EU law sees it as a cherished human right; in America,it is more about consumer protection. Moreover, America’s National Security Agency (NSA)—the biggest and most powerful electronic-intelligence agency in the world— sparks fears in Europe of untrammelled snooping. The EU has no intelligence agencies of its own—so the tradeoffs between security and privacy which exist at national levels (where spymasters cooperate gladly and gratefully with the NSA) are...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com