The issue came to a head after it was ruled that the Safe Harbor agreement — which allowed for multinational companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, to retain personal data connected with EU citizens on US servers — was unlawful.
Advancing technology & Preserving #FundamentalRights are 2 sides of the same coin #DigitalValues #DigitalSingleMarket
— Věra Jourová (@VeraJourova) January 18, 2016
Lawyers from the major Internet companies — as well as many other transatlantic companies that share customer data across the Atlantic — have been struggling to reach an agreement between the US and the EU, ahead of a deadline at the end of January for a Safe Harbor 2 agreement.
However, the stumbling block has been the amount of independent scrutiny there is of the data held on US servers and how access to it for surveillance purposes can be controlled. The EU has stricter laws on the oversight of intelligence agencies than the US.
"We need guarantees that there is effective judicial control of public authorities' access to data for national security, law enforcement and public interest purposes," EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said at a conference in Brussels.
Deadline Looming
Following the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013 of mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ, the issue of mass surveillance became global — particularly, among human rights and privacy campaigners.
In October 2015, the European Court of Justice declared Safe Harbor invalid in a case brought by Austrian citizen Maximillian Schrems regarding Facebook's processing of his personal data. The court found that the "United States authorities were able to access the personal data transferred from the Member States to the United States and process it in a way incompatible, in particular, with the purposes for which it was transferred."
Since then, the EU has been pressing the US for a mandatory reporting system for companies to declare the number of requests for access to data by the intelligence agencies. US negotiators have so far resisted the idea.
Since the data — on millions of transactions across the Atlantic — affect so many companies, there is considerable pressure to reach agreement. Four large trade bodies signed a letter to the negotiators calling for an agreement by the end of January, according to a document seen by the AFP press agency.
