"Data Transfer Pact Between U.S. and Europe Is Ruled Invalid"

News Alert! For any Company with EU employees.

(full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/technology/european-union-us-data-collection.html?_r=0)

By MARK SCOTT   OCT. 6, 2015   New York Times

Europe's highest court ruled on Tuesday that a widely used international agreement for moving people's digital data between the European Union and the United States was invalid.

The decision, by the European Court of Justice, throws into doubt how global technology giants like Facebook and Google can collect, manage and analyze online information from their millions of users in the 28-member bloc. The court decreed that the data-transfer agreement was invalid as of Tuesday's ruling.

The court is the highest legal authority in the European Union, and its decision cannot be appealed. It was not clear how companies would be able to immediately comply with the ruling.

(The article further continues) 

The data-sharing agreement has been in place since 2000, enabling American technology companies to compile data generated by their European clients in web searches, social media posts and other online activities.

Under the deal, called a safe harbor agreement, more than 4,000 European and American companies - both tech and nontech businesses - have been expected to treat the information moved outside the European Union with the same privacy protections the data had inside the region.

But European privacy campaigners have balked at those activities, contending that American data protection rules do not offer the same protections to individuals that are available in Europe.

By mandating that companies can no longer move data about their European customers to the United States, the European Court of Justice said that national data protection regulators also had the right to review how these companies share data between regions. The national regulators could limit such data-sharing activities if they believed their citizens' data could be used in ways not guaranteed under European law, the court said...(read the full article using the url above)