
EU-U.S. Data Sharing Deal Can't Be Trusted, Top Court Aide Says - sveme
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-23/eu-u-s-data-sharing-deal-can-t-be-trusted-top-court-aide-says
======
sveme
This should be of interest to all American startups: if the court agrees with
this assessment, you will have to store European user data on European servers
and cannot transfer these to the US. Probably not even for data analysis. AWS
and others will likely set up something quickly, but you'll still have to keep
that in mind when trying to establish a presence in the EU.

So ultimately the NSA will have broken up the internet into separate regional
entities.

Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, never wanted to be one.

~~~
bbrazil
It's not just that, EU startups who currently depend on US-based services are
going to be in quite a bit of trouble unless they got consent from their users
to put their data in the US.

~~~
mtgx
As a user, that sounds pretty awesome. Of course in practice it will probably
mean that they will throw this in the "privacy" policy, where they also
enumerate all the ways in which they can track you and share your information.

"By the way, we're also sending this data to US government-accessible servers.
By reading or _not reading_ this you hereby consent to us doing that. Oh - and
did we mention _how much_ we care about your privacy and security? We just
wanted to make sure you got that."

Hopefully the EU will also mandate some kind of _real_ (but usable) consent
mechanism to this sort of stuff, that's unlike the whole cookie story.

~~~
skrause
At least in Germany it's not possible to override laws by writing something
different in a privacy policy or EULA. Even EULAs are mostly invalid. I guess
it's the same in most European countries.

~~~
arethuza
Once something becomes a "consumer" contract then a lot of extra legal
protections kick in (at least here in the UK) e.g.

[https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/protection-for-
th...](https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/protection-for-the-
consumer/consumer-contracts/unfair-terms-in-consumer-contracts/)

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s_dev
I suspect this ruling will work out very well for Ireland. US multinationals
already see Ireland as an "Atlantic bridge" for getting a foothold in Europe
often by placing their EMEA HQ in Dublin.

Ireland is playing up to this role and this ruling sort of hammers home the
status quo that if international tech companies want to deal with the EU they
will have to have separate facilities to house European data as they can't
ship it all back to California.

Ireland will become the EUs primary data centre -- it has the right
combination of climate, tax rates, tech presence, political diplomacy and data
protection laws.

In many cases though the ruling will probably just result in an extra line on
the EULA.

~~~
ajtaylor
Having lived in Ireland for 4 years, I can say that the physical environment
was a mixed bag. Yes, it's beautifully green everywhere, but at the cost of
tons of rain and cold, clammy days.

Or maybe you were referring to the political climate?

~~~
s_dev
The soft rain and mild climate is good for data centres in a physical sense
because of its stability. Irelands temperature range is like 25C degrees from
trough to peak in winter and summer and even the daily change in temperature
is slow.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Ireland#Climate_cha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Ireland#Climate_charts)

If you lived in Ireland I'm sure you'll agree the weather is "very consistent"
in a sense.

~~~
ajtaylor
The weather is most definitely consistent - consistently cool and very, very
rarely hot.

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zobzu
Safe harbor is sadly more of a guideline/joke. Smaller companies that do not
have to hand over data to the nsa get training for it which is basically :

Change nothing of what you do, keep mishandling user data, but if ever eu sues
us we will sue employees back.

So in the end data is not protected anyway and safe harbor is a smoke screen
at best.

And yes i get the yearly joke training.

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pjc50
The primary source:
[http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2015...](http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2015-09/cp150106en.pdf)

(
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10264410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10264410)
)

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vbezhenar
Similar law works in Russia. There was a lot of rant among developers. It's
funny to see Europe going to the same direction.

