- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
The amount of mental gymnastics required to believe that an agreement with the US will prevent them from gaining access to data stored by US companies on EU soil is staggering. And it’s repeatedly been shown to be fiction, as US national security laws will always supercede such an agreement.
It’s even more silly now that the US has a president that’s very clearly opposed to the agreement, and recently made the supervisory authority that’s supposed to enforce the agreement (PCLOB) inoperable by suspending appointed members such that there aren’t enough of them to make a decision.
Bert Hubert has a very good article going into this in more detail, with lots of links for further reading: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/
It’s time we put this fiction to rest and accept that data stored in clouds owned by US companies is available to those companies, and therefore to the US government, and will continue to be so no matter what gets written on a piece of paper.
This is just a product that lets companies point to that piece of paper and say “see, with this agreement, we follow the letter of our data privacy laws”.
It’s a compliance tool.Yes, I know. And my point is that the arguments used to justify how it enables compliance never held up, and now with the supervisory authority not being functional anymore it can’t possibly be said to comply with the letter of the law even in the most charitable reading. The legal basis of the agreement was built on the existence of the PCLOB ensuring adequate protection of personal data. With the PCLOB being neutered and inoperable, that basis no longer holds.