Ireland’s data regulator has reportedly sent Facebook a preliminary order to stop transferring user data from the European Union to the United States.
A recent report from the Wall Street Journal states that Ireland’s data regulator has sent a preliminary order to Facebook ordering the social media giant to stop transferring user data from the EU to America. The order was sent to Facebook by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission in August according to the WSJ.
CNBC reports that Facebook declined to comment when contacted about the situation but referred to a blog post by the company’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, Nick Clegg, which was published this week and states that the DPC has started an inquiry into Facebook’s EU-U.S. data transfers.
The report comes months after the European Court of Justice ruled that the data transfer standard between the EU and the U.S. does not adequately protect the privacy of European citizens. The court, the highest legal authority in the EU, restricted how U.S. firms could send European user data to the U.S. after determining that EU citizens had no effective way to challenge American government surveillance.
U.S. agencies including the NSA could request that tech firms such as Facebook and Google hand over an EU citizen’s data without the citizen’s knowledge. The ECJ ruling came shortly after Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems filed a lawsuit following information revealed by Edward Snowden, arguing that U.S. law did not offer sufficient protection against surveillance by public authorities.
The court ruling invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement that enabled firms to send EU citizen’s data to the U.S. Companies were then forced to rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or SCCs. Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom wrote in a blog post: “The Irish Data Protection Commission has commenced an inquiry into Facebook controlled EU-US data transfers, and has suggested that SCCs cannot in practice be used for EU-US data transfers.”
Clegg added: “While this approach is subject to further process, if followed, it could have a far-reaching effect on businesses that rely on SCCs and on the online services many people and businesses rely on.”
Read the full blog post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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