US and EU make progress in data regulation

Insiders say the US and the EU are making progress in joint consultations on data privacy regulations. This is what the economic newspaper The Wall Street Journal reports.

In these conversations The two sides are trying to resolve the conflict between EU data protection law and US law and the scope of US intelligence law, so that data can be moved between the two regions without any problem.

Conflict between laws and mutual regulations

The heart of the conflict is the contradiction between European data privacy law on the one hand and US intelligence law on the other. These contradict each other and can hamper the free flow of business data.

This mainly concerns the storage of data on European people in data centers located in the United States. Under European GDPR law, businesses cannot simply disclose this data for intelligence purposes. US law legally allows intelligence agencies to request this information without further delay.

Recent European case law

A recent judgment of the European Court shows that companies that process European personal data cannot simply send it to American data centers. This is because EU residents in the US can hardly object to their data being viewed by the US government.

Consequences for tech giants

For example, this move has major consequences for big tech giants, such as Facebook and Google. In Ireland, where the EU’s headquarters are located, Facebook recently received a warning from the Irish privacy regulator ordering it to stop storing European personal data on US soil. Also in Portugal, the national statistics office had to stop processing certain data because it was using Cloudflare’s data centers in the United States.

It remains to be seen what the outcome of the negotiations will bring. If the US wants to meet with the EU in this area, US law will likely need to be changed. And that’s probably something that won’t happen anytime soon, experts told The Wall Street Journal.