The EU-US Privacy Shield: The New Data Protection Deal

The (Un)Safe Harbor and Schrems

As explained in detail in our article from October 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared in its judgment in the case of Schrems v Facebook that the EU-US Safe Harbor agreement (Safe Harbor) was invalid. This meant that data transfers between European Union Member States and the United States which were taking place under Safe Harbor, were no longer lawful.

The decision was primarily based on the ability of the US authorities to access personal data transferred from the Member States to the United States and process it in a way incompatible with the purposes for which it was transferred and beyond what was strictly necessary and proportionate for the protection of national security.