Biden order promises EU citizens better data privacy

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday designed to allay European concerns that U.S. intelligence agencies are illegally spying on them. That has created uncertainty for tech giants including Google and Facebook’s parent company Meta, raising the prospect that U.S. tech firms might need to keep European data out of the U.S. Industry groups largely welcomed Biden’s order but European consumer rights and privacy campaigners, including activist Max Schrems whose complaint kicked off the legal battle a decade earlier, were skeptical whether it goes far enough and could end up in the bloc’s top court again. The European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, said the framework has “significant improvements” over the original Privacy Shield and it would now work on adopting a final decision clearing the way for data to flow freely between EU and U.S. companies certified under the framework. “However much the U.S. authorities try to paper over the cracks of the original Privacy Shield, the reality is that the EU and U.S. still have a different approach to data protection which cannot be cancelled out by an executive order,” said the group’s deputy director general, Ursula Pachl. Ashley Gorski, an ACLU senior staff attorney, said in a statement that “it fails to ensure that people whose privacy is violated will have their claims resolved by a wholly independent decision-maker.” Further, the ACLU said in a tweet, “The order still allows our government to engage in bulk, generalized data collection.” Schrems said while his Vienna-based group, NOYB, would need time to study the order, his initial reading is that it “seems to fail” on some key requirements, including for surveillance to be necessary and proportionate under the EU’s Charter of Fundamental rights to avoid indiscriminate mass data collection.