EU-US Privacy Shield threatened by Trump executive order
27/01/2017
President Trump’s Executive Order from yesterday would take away privacy protection from non-US citizens in the US, and thus put the EU-US Privacy Shield in danger.
Jan Philip Albrecht, MEP, tweeted yesterday at the CPDP conference on hearing the news: ‘if this is true, the EU Commission has to immediately suspend the Privacy Shield.’ Bruno Gencarelli, Head of Data Protection Unit at the EU Commission, said it was too early to comment.
However, at today’s CPDP panel discussion about Trump and the open Internet, Jennifer Granick from the Stanford Center for Internet and Society said that although this move looks politically bad for the Privacy Shield, at the end of the day the Executive Order may not have any legal effect. The Judicial Redress Act already extends privacy rights to foreigners. “Maybe this does not actually do much to the umbrella agreement,” she said. But other aspects affect the Privacy Shield such as spying on Europeans.
Read more about this topic, adequacy and data transfers in the February issue of Privacy Laws & Business International Report. To subscribe, go to www.privacylaws.com/publications