Safe Harbor

Data Protection Directive

The Article 29 Working Party’s new Opinion on the US–EU Privacy Shield draft adequacy decision leaves a lot of questions unanswered and further prolongs the period of uncertainty for anyone transferring personal data from Europe to the USA.

29 February 2016 at 2:40pm

Safe Harbor/Privacy Shield

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.

12 February 2016 at 9:29am

Safe Harbor: Advice Postponed

Cloud computing

The Article 29 Working Party of European data protection supervisors had hoped to make a full statement on the EU/US Safe Harbor agreement at the end of January. However this has now been postponed, probably until mid-April. The European Court of Justice declared last October that the original Safe Harbor did not guarantee adequate protection when personal data were transferred from Europe to the USA.

29 October 2015 at 4:13pm

ICO on Safe Harbor judgment

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".

19 October 2015 at 4:56pm

Article 29 Working Party on Safe Harbor

The Article 29 Working Party of European Data Protection supervisors has now published its response to the European Court's ruling that the US-EU Safe Harbor agreement can no longer be relied upon when exporting personal data from the European Economic Area.

14 October 2015 at 1:45pm

Safe Harbor at the European Court