La European Court established, in a ruling today, that the United States does not guarantee an adequate level of protection of personal data. Today's decision of the EU Court is particularly striking Facebook and comes after that Max Schrems, a 27-year-old Austrian, law student and Facebook user since 2008, had asked the Irish authorities that his data on the social network not be stored in the United States where the NSA case had broken out.
The Court, with today's sentence, has practically agreed with the young Austrian and from now on considers invalid the decision of the European Commission back in 2000 which had considered adequate the American guarantees on data protection in the United States. The European Court underlined how, today, the needs of American national security prevail over the Safe Harbor regime to which the private data of European citizens transferred to the USA are subjected. Therefore, American companies "are required to disregard, without limits, - says the EU Court - the rules of protection envisaged".
So what happens?
Today, the data of European Facebook users is stored on a server based in Ireland, from there it is then transferred to the USA. With this sentence potentially, every single state of the European Union, in order to guarantee greater privacy for its citizens, can ask to stop the transfer of personal data to American servers.
Now it is up to the Irish authorities to examine the complaint of the Austrian Schrems and make a decision: to maintain the current system or to follow the sentence of the EU Court and suspend the transfer of data of European subscribers to Facebook to the United States.
