Category Archives: Privacy

Safe Harbor – Personal Data Of EU Citizens Not Safe In The USA?

Safe HarborSafe Harbor is no more. Well Safe Harbor still exists but following a ruling in the European Court of Justice it has now been ruled as an invalid mechanism to protect the data and privacy of European Union citizens personal data when it is moved to the USA from the EU. In essence this is a damning statement that says European Citizen personal data was never safe from certain parties in the USA.

TThis is down to the fact that the US government is perceived as having used that transmitted data to spy on citizens (as alleged by Edward Snowdon). There is no suggestion of bad behaviour by US organizations themselves who generally offer much better protection than many companies could develop and maintain themselves.

Exactly what this means is still being worked on. I suspect it will mean a lot of scrambling and head scratching for the many organizations (estimated at about 4500) who use Safe Harbor. Those organizations use it to enable them to run a centralized internal IT platform which supports their entire global operations, to offer centralized platforms for consumers hosted and run totally out of the US and for companies who move data around as part of their general business approach.

This week I had a number of non-IT friends ask me what this was all about. Mainly these questions are coming as the ruling is making news headlines around Europe. This post is a summary of what I tried to explain to them. Safe Harbor is something most people never knew existed in the first place and it is amazing it has taken over our televisions.

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