On Friday, May 25, the day when GDPR became effective, noyb.eu (None of Your Business), the non-profit privacy organization recently set up by Max Schrems, filed the first complaints based on GDPR.
Max Schrems is the Austrian privacy lawyer who had complained about the transfer of his data to the United States by Facebook: he argued that, in light of the Snowden revelations,… More
Recently, Austrian privacy activist Maximilian Schrems won a partial victory in his continuing battles with Facebook. We discuss that case below. But first, we review his prior tilts with Facebook.
Schrems in Ireland’s Courts
When Schrems was a college student, he heard a Facebook representative at a conference talk about European privacy rules with a lack of consideration that shocked him. Since then, Schrems has been fighting Facebook on many fronts.… More
A 152 page judgment was rendered today by the Irish High Court in Schrems II: DPC v Facebook.
Not surprisingly, the court decided to refer the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union to make a decision about the validity of the three decisions issued by the Commission for the Standard Contractual Clauses.
Ms. Justice Caroline Costello referred these issues because she concurred with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s view there are “well founded”… More
The current challenge to Facebook’s privacy practices in Ireland (“Schrems II”) may be coming to a head. You will recall that in Schrems I, the challenge to Facebook’s privacy practices led to a decision issued by the European Court of Justice that invalidated the US-EU Safe Harbor. Following the invalidation of the Safe Harbor, Facebook switched to the Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) and the Schrems complaint was reformulated to challenge the SCC.… More
Reuters reported earlier this month that, according to three former employees, Yahoo Inc. had “complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo mail accounts at the behest of the NSA or FBI.” Yahoo responded that the article was misleading, but did not deny the scanning had occurred.
The New York Times reported further details about this scanning: Yahoo had modified a system intended to scan emails for child pornography and spam in order to satisfy a secret court order requiring it to search for messages containing a computer “signature” tied to the communications of a state-sponsored terrorist organization.… More
After the European Court of Justice invalidated Safe Harbor on October 6, 2015, the Article 29 Working Party announced in an October 16, 2015 statement that US companies that were Safe Harbor certified had until the end of January 2016 to find alternative means to transfer data to the US and, if they failed to do so, EU Data Protection Authorities would pursue enforcement measures.… More
After the invalidation of the Safe Harbor by the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) last October in the Schrems case, negotiations between the European Commission and US authorities led to a new agreement called the EU-US Privacy Shield. However, the EU’s 1995 Data Protection Directive provides that the Article 29 Working Party (“WP29”) has to issue an opinion on this kind of agreements and it did so on April 13.… More