Two years later and it still sucks: Privacy Shield progress panned More than two years in, Privacy Shield still isn't fit for purpose – and data protection experts and politicians want to see a bigger commitment ahead of its second annual review. The agreement, rushed through in the summer of 2016 after its predecessor Safe Harbor was scrapped, governs data flows between the European Union …
The Register should ask Buttarelli if Privacy Shield can still stand in face of it.
It gives access to EU citizen data to US authorities even when they are stored on EU soil, with little oversight, but from US courts which are the same that allowed bulk collection of data.
To be honest, I don't think anybody expected Privacy Shield to last very long. Even the authors will have known it was a stopgap.
The European Commission had to quickly draft something they could present to the Council and Parliament to replace Safe Harbour to prevent half of the online economy between the EU and the US to collapse pretty suddenly. The writing may have been on the wall with the growing unease about Safe Harbour but it was the European Court of Justice strike down that came as a bit of a surprise. The surprise was not necessarily that they struck it down, the surprise was that they did it on the basis of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. That charter defines the fundamental rights of EU Citizens and they trump everything else.
That meant there was no way to change laws to make them compliant with the existing privacy framework, Safe Harbour. They had to find another way, make the privacy framework compliant with the Charter. Privacy Shield is just the first step on that path, definitely not the destination.
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