Privacy Shield – A Shield Worth Having?

By Jonathan S. Millard, Tyler G. Newby​ and Heidi Liu*

Earlier this week, the European Commission voted to formally approve the Privacy Shield—a set of principles agreed between the E.U. and the U.S. to enable certified U.S. companies to receive and process personal data from the E.U. The finalization of the Privacy Shield has followed months of political and regulatory wrangling over its terms, with previous drafts being subject to criticism from an array of concerned parties, which ultimately delayed the Privacy Shield's original June 2016 implementation target. Now that we have the new and improved version, we take a look at some of the key changes made to the previous proposal and consider what U.S. companies should be thinking about when weighing up their options to facilitate trans-border data flows.