European Court of Justice rules that US breached EU citizens’ fundamental rights

A more detailed article has appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this morning:

“This judgment is first and foremost a victory. A victory for the Austrian young attorney Max Schrems, who tried for four years with requests and complaints, the American Internet company Facebook to force due to lack of data protection in the knee. It's a battle between David and Goliath, a now 28 years young lawyer and activist against the biggest social network in the world with 1.5 billion users, more than 10,000 employees, a market capitalization of more than 250 billion dollars, enough money, a private Army to keep the best American and European lawyers.

“The accusation is true that governments have underestimated the grotesque challenges of the digital world. They have failed, the data protection rules, designed to abut on international recognition. Who wants a global network, has to make compromises. Neither the American laissez-faire, nor the German Regelwütigkeit lead thence, who still wants to protect the last user from his self-inflicted online exhibitionism.”


More (DE)

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/maechtige-internetriesen/facebook-urteil-niederlage-fuer-das-internet-13841520.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2

The Irish Independent has published a rather sensationalist, perhaps clueless headline on the ECJ ruling “ECJ says that US-EU data transfer deal is invalid in blow to multinationals”

Quite the contrary. It forms the basis for Irish based companies of all types to say “no can do” without a court order relating to the matter at hand, when data transfers are requested. Microsoft is (so they say) taking legal action to prevent the company’s US arm from being forced to steal data from servers located in Ireland. Perhaps Microsoft would be more convincing if it used the European justice system (rather than the US courts) if the company is serious about this objective. The US owned cloud industry stands to lose around USD 20 bn in revenues over the next five years, because many European and other companies will not use a US based company to provide IT services.

It seems to me that Irish management of many MNCs have been negligent in not making their obligation under EU data protection laws known to their shareholders in the US, and basically saying no to requests for copying / data transfer.

These MNCs are scooping up some of the brightest people around - people who may well have their own start-up businesses in the absence of employment with an MNC.

The judgement has underscored the unwillingness / inability of the Irish regulator to force Facebook & cie to abide by European and Irish law. Which is a form of government corruption - ie gov.ie is taking bribes in the form of often miserly (eg 2% in the case of Apple) “tax bribes” to facilitate these MNCs to sell out the personal data of Irish and other European citizens.

If Irish and European law was strictly enforced – which might include arresting the Irish based executives working for Facebook etc in the near future, people shown to be involved with data copying/transfer to the US, one would create clarity for all parties in terms of their obligations and expectations. The "safe harbor" is no more.

The issue does not just relate to the US. While Britain is theoretically in the EU for the moment, it regularly trades stolen data with the Americans. France is not following EU data privacy laws either – since Charlie Hebdo, the Hexagon has been trading people’s personal info with US “spy central”. The EU can’t claim the “high ground” on data privacy while it permits these breaches of human rights of the public to continue. The answer to Charlie Hebdo is stop drawing offensive cartoons and publishing them - it is not freedom of speech - it is sacrilegious in the minds of many. The answer to preventing ISIS and Iraq/Syria is not to send armies to those countries and attempt to steal oil and enforce western values, killing a million odd mainly innocent souls in the process. Ditto for Libya.

When one downloads the latest version of programs like Flash, one often is by default (annoyingly) forced into downloading the “anti-virus” software – ie the publisher of Flash (Adobe) no doubt receives $$$ for each download it tricks the consumer into making. Similarly “free” email services such as Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail etc often stop a user from signing in demanding a mobile phone number from them for “password recovery” purposes. I suspect that one way or another some or all of these free email providers are selling these mobile phone numbers, along with email data to US spy agencies for $$$.


http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/european-court-of-justice-agreement-that-gave-us-spy-chiefs-access-to-the-online-data-of-millions-of-citizens-is-invalid-31586079.html