The latest announcement from the Article 29 Working Party on the US-EU Privacy Shield also suggests that there shouldn't be any short-term surprises for those using the other justifications for exporting personal data to the USA.

The European Commission has now published draft texts that could be used to implement an EU/US Privacy Shield to replace the previous Safe Harbor agreement. It appears that the new scheme would only cover "commercial exchanges" of personal data between the EU and US so it is unlikely to be appropriate for export of personal data to US universities or non-profit organisations.

The Information Commissioner's Office has published a new article on how they are responding to the European Court's Safe Harbor judgment. The overall message is that data controllers should take stock and not panic. While noting that the judgment does remove some of the former legal certainty, the ICO is "certainly not rushing to use our enforcement powers".

The European Court's declaration today that the European Commission's fifteen year old decision on the US Safe Harbor scheme is no longer reliable is another recognition that Data Protection requires continuing assessment, rather than one-off decisions. European regulators have been recommending for years that neither data controllers nor companies to which they export data should rely on Safe Harbor certification alone. The U.K.