EU Advances Its Data-Flow Deal After US Makes Surveillance Changes

The European Union took a significant step toward completing a deal with the U.S. that would allow personal information about Europeans to be stored legally on U.S. soil, reducing the threat of regulatory action against thousands of companies that routinely transmit such information. From a report: The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, on Tuesday published a draft approval of the preliminary deal it struck in March with the U.S. government. The agreement would re-establish a framework that makes it easy for businesses to transfer such information again following the invalidation of a previous agreement by an EU court in 2020. As part of the new deal, the U.S. is offering -- and has started to implement -- new safeguards on how its intelligence authorities can access that data. If concluded, the deal could resolve one of the thorniest outstanding issues between the two economic giants. Hanging in the balance has been the ability of businesses to use U.S.-based data centers to do things such as sell online ads, measure their website traffic or manage company payroll in Europe. Blocking data transfers could upend billions of dollars of trade from cross-border data activities, including cloud services, human resources, marketing and advertising, if they involve sending or storing information about Europeans on U.S. soil, tech advocates say.

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