The European Union’s highest court struck down a system European and U.S. companies use to transfer sensitive personal information based on a fundamental misunderstanding of American privacy laws, the White House charged on Tuesday.
“[W]e have a variety of concerns about this specific ruling; one of them is that we believe that this decision was based on incorrect assumptions about data privacy protections in the United States,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Since 2000, nations on both sides of the Atlantic have used a system established by the European Commission known as the “safe harbor” system to transfer sensitive data ranging from personnel records to online advertising information.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on Tuesday that safe harbor does not adequately protect EU citizens’ privacy. The court concluded that the system’s concessions to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement concerns put Europeans’ personal information at risk.
The court also noted that EU citizens have no redress in the U.S. if they feel their personal information is abused. The judges specifically referenced former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. intelligence gathering.
More than 4,000 companies, including Facebook and Google, use the system. With the ruling, which takes immediate effect, U.S. companies will now have to draft privacy protection contracts or win approval for their procedures from the various European agencies that enforce data protection laws.
But the White House insisted that the U.S. system is perfectly safe for Europeans.
“[T]he U.S. legal framework for intelligence collection includes robust protection for privacy under multiple layers of oversight and a remarkable degree of transparency,” Earnest said. “Many of those are reforms that have been put in place in just the last few years, consistent with the president’s stated commitment to greater transparency.”
The EU ruling “fails to properly credit the benefits to privacy and growth that have been afforded by this framework over the last 15 years,” Earnest added. “[W]e certainly have been working with our European counterparts in recent months to release an updated safe harbor framework.
“The United States, principally, through the Department of Commerce, will work with the European Union to provide certainty to companies both in Europe and in the United States, to release an updated” program, Earnest said.
