Nov. 05, 2015 — London
There has been plenty of talks recently about the Safe Harbour agreement and these discussions have now come to a boiling point with the suspension of the agreement by European courts of justice.
The Safe Harbour agreement has been in place since July 2000 after there were growing concerns about the safety of European data whilst stored in the US. The main reason that the agreement came about was due to the inherent differences in the way that sensitive data was stored in the US compared to the way it was stored in Europe. Companies based in Europe had concerns over the safety and privacy of such data and the Safe Harbour agreement was eventually put in place to safeguard the storage and protection of this data.
At the time lawmakers agreed that the agreement was sufficient to protect such data whilst it was stored in the US and the agreement has remained in place ever since with any such company located in the US and handling private European data having to sign the agreement.
Despite this agreement being in place for many years the recent leaks regarding the use of sensitive information by the NSA have given cause for this agreement to be reassessed.
“Leaks about the quasi-legal use of data by the NSA had a massive impact on the trust in the safety that was guaranteed to EU citizens by Safe Harbour”, says Paul Sala, CEO of FreshMail, a well-known email marketing provide based in Europe.
The concerns for the safety of European data stored in the US has in fact lead to the suspension of the agreement, effective September 23rd 2015 until further notice. The reasons for this suspension center on the fact that lawmakers no longer consider the agreement sufficient protection.
What does this mean for businesses based in Europe?
This change will have a major effect on any business based in Europe that has data stored on US based servers. These companies need to reconsider the storage of their data now that the agreement is no longer effective. This is likely to lead to many businesses relocating data to servers and/or companies based in Europe.
For the US this means a big change in the tech marketplace and will likely result in many data storage providers losing business to their European counterparts.
Contact
To learn more please contact:
Maria Wahal
Media Relations
http://freshmail.com
88 Wood Street, London
EC2V 7RS, United Kingdom
Phone: +44 203 598 5098
[email protected]