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Did the European Court of Justice Just Torpedo the Mother of All US Trade Agreements?

October 9, 2015

Did the European Court of Justice Just Torpedo the Mother of All US Trade Agreements?

Europe’s already rocky trading relationship with the U.S. just got a whole lot worse. Thanks to one young man’s battle against one of the world’s biggest tech companies, data traffic underpinning the world’s largest trading relationship has been thrown into jeopardy.

As the Wall Street Journal warns, hanging in the balance could be billions of dollars of trade in the online advertising business, as well as more quotidian tasks such as storing human-resources documents about European colleagues.

A Decidedly Unsafe Harbor

When, in 2013, the Austrian law graduate Max Schrems filed a data-privacy-infringement lawsuit against Facebook after Edward Snowden had revealed the full extent of the company’s collusion with the NSA, little could he have imagined the impact he would end up having. Now, two years later, the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbor Agreement that has governed EU data flows across the Atlantic for some 15 years is no longer valid.

As Tech Crunch notes, the new ruling will affect all companies that outsource data processing of E.U. users’ data to the U.S:

The Safe Harbor executive decision allows companies to self certify to provide “adequate protection” for the data of European users to comply with the European data protection directive, and with fundamental European rights such as the right to privacy (under Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights).

In response to the ruling, Schrems said it “draws a clear line” by clarifying that mass surveillance “violates our fundamental rights.” The ruling will also directly affect the operations of some 4,500 European and international companies, including U.S. tech giants Alphabet (Google’s newborn parent company), Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.

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