'Nothing to see here', says ECJ as Safe Harbour opinion delayed

Sources at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have denied there's a conspiracy behind the publication delay of a crucial opinion in the Europe v Facebook case. The ECJ attorney general (AG) was due to give his opinion on 24 June, a decision which could potentially bring down the Safe Harbour dataflow agreement between the EU …

[Ole Juul]

nerve

". . . judicial redress rights for European citizens equivalent to those enjoyed by Americans."

It sickens me that this sort of thing even needs to be discussed.

[Chris Cartledge]

I may be a pedant but...

"safe harbour" should be Safe Harbor, I think, see: www.export.gov/safeharbor/

[Beech Horn]

Re: I may be a pedant but...

In the US you drop the 'u' in the rest of the world (AFAIK) we keep it. So a .gov site (US) will say harbor, whereas we'll say harbour. For instance: https://www.google.co.uk/search?newwindow=1&espv=2&q=site%3A.gov.uk+%22safe+harbour%22&oq=site%3A.gov.uk+%22safe+harbour

[Antonymous Coward]

Re: I may be a pedant but...

I'd suggest the perverse, almost sarcastic, abuse of the word "safe" is a more fitting focus for one's pedantry than the Yanks' well known inability to spell.

[Sir Sham Cad]

Amazon S3

Recently for work I was investigating secure cloud storage options from what was G-Cloud. Amazon S3 was the only one I looked at that would potentially store data in the US under Safe Harbour agreement. In fact:

"Data management location: UK, EU, USA - Safe Harbor, Other countries with data protection treaties"

and

"Legal jurisdiction of service provider: USA - Safe Harbor"

So I recommended against it.

If Safe Harbour is pulled then Amazon will need to drastically change how they manage S3 data or they'll lose all EU public sector business.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Amazon S3

This is why many companies, including those that run services on AWS, are moving European data to European data centres. Sufficiently pliant governments exist to give the US spooks access whenever they want it but there will be a fig-leaf of oversight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprised about delays..

If the ECJ declares Safe Harbor as dead, it means that any organisation in the EU that uses Gmail for its email is in trouble (for example, but it's really any EU business that uses US based resources to store anything that can be deemed personal data). It means that Silicon Valley will take a massive hit because it turns a problem that is currently only tiptoed around in US boardrooms into a publicly declared and confirmed legal stance.

I suspect there is thus a massive amount of seriously heavy arm twisting going on behind the scenes. After all, Safe Harbor itself is very clearly not a solution but more a political patch of a very clear mismatch in how privacy is dealt with on either side of the divide.

The problem is that even declaring Safe Harbor as still applicable is not going to be enough to stem the tide - it's too late for that.

So yes, I am not surprised by the delay. To me, it suggests that the initial verdict was that Safe Harbor is dead. Any other decision would have been public already.

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Not surprised about delays..

I'd been thinking the same re: universities I work for, which both use Microsoft products for their cloudy stuff. There is a lot at stake here, and the true leaders* of the USA need to put pressure on before business evaporates.

* Big business

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that the US government can point at the latest French laws in this area presumably this whole issue is dead ?

[Doctor Syntax]

What is the ECJ's deciding?

A death warrant or just a coroner's verdict?

[Doctor Syntax]

The deal created a voluntary framework whereby companies promise to protect European citizens’ data and in involuntary one where they can't.

FTFY

[Daedalus801]

I think the icon says it all...........

o ->

[Will Godfrey]

Reminds me of...

Some years back a friend had a strange growth on his back, but left it a very long time before telling anyone.

The result was that the growth had worked so far into his spine that it was impossible to remove without the risk of waist down paralysis.

If the rest of the world were my friend, guess what that makes the USA?

[John Savard]

Didn't the Register recently carry a story about a new international trade treaty that would forbid countries from placing restrictions on the storage of personal data in other countries merely because of privacy concerns? Surely the prospect of such a treaty - particularly if it is being negotiated in secret - could interfere with the relevance of any decision made on this issue by the courts?

[Intractable Potsherd]

Would that be TTIP, by any chance? From the point of view of the individual, there is absolutely fuck all about that abomination which is any good.