The latest clash between Facebook (FB.O) and Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems could disrupt hundreds of thousands of companies as Europe’s top court rules on Thursday on the legality of tools companies use to transfer Europeans’ data around the world.
At stake are standard contractual clauses used by Facebook, banks, industrial giants, carmakers and others to transfer personal data to the United States and other parts of the world for services ranging from cloud infrastructure, data hosting, payroll and finance to marketing.
Another key issue is whether the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, set up in 2016 to protect Europeans’ personal data transferred across the Atlantic for commercial use, is lawful or not. The same court rejected its predecessor known as Safe Harbour.
Source: Reuters