'Nothing to see here', says ECJ as Safe Harbour opinion delayed Sources at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have denied there's a conspiracy behind the publication delay of a crucial opinion in the Europe v Facebook case. The ECJ attorney general (AG) was due to give his opinion on 24 June, a decision which could potentially bring down the Safe Harbour dataflow agreement between the EU …
In the US you drop the 'u' in the rest of the world (AFAIK) we keep it. So a .gov site (US) will say harbor, whereas we'll say harbour. For instance: https://www.google.co.uk/search?newwindow=1&espv=2&q=site%3A.gov.uk+%22safe+harbour%22&oq=site%3A.gov.uk+%22safe+harbour
Recently for work I was investigating secure cloud storage options from what was G-Cloud. Amazon S3 was the only one I looked at that would potentially store data in the US under Safe Harbour agreement. In fact:
"Data management location: UK, EU, USA - Safe Harbor, Other countries with data protection treaties"
and
"Legal jurisdiction of service provider: USA - Safe Harbor"
So I recommended against it.
If Safe Harbour is pulled then Amazon will need to drastically change how they manage S3 data or they'll lose all EU public sector business.
If the ECJ declares Safe Harbor as dead, it means that any organisation in the EU that uses Gmail for its email is in trouble (for example, but it's really any EU business that uses US based resources to store anything that can be deemed personal data). It means that Silicon Valley will take a massive hit because it turns a problem that is currently only tiptoed around in US boardrooms into a publicly declared and confirmed legal stance.
I suspect there is thus a massive amount of seriously heavy arm twisting going on behind the scenes. After all, Safe Harbor itself is very clearly not a solution but more a political patch of a very clear mismatch in how privacy is dealt with on either side of the divide.
The problem is that even declaring Safe Harbor as still applicable is not going to be enough to stem the tide - it's too late for that.
So yes, I am not surprised by the delay. To me, it suggests that the initial verdict was that Safe Harbor is dead. Any other decision would have been public already.
Some years back a friend had a strange growth on his back, but left it a very long time before telling anyone.
The result was that the growth had worked so far into his spine that it was impossible to remove without the risk of waist down paralysis.
If the rest of the world were my friend, guess what that makes the USA?
Didn't the Register recently carry a story about a new international trade treaty that would forbid countries from placing restrictions on the storage of personal data in other countries merely because of privacy concerns? Surely the prospect of such a treaty - particularly if it is being negotiated in secret - could interfere with the relevance of any decision made on this issue by the courts?
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