EU and US reach new agreement on international data transfers

The European Union and the United States have agreed to transfer personal data back and forth between the two blocs. This treaty, which was suspended in 2020 because it was considered that it did not guarantee the privacy of European citizens, took place during Joe Biden's visit to Brussels. With the new regulatory framework, it is expected that US companies such as Google, Amazon or Meta will be able to continue to manage some European users' data on US servers.

 

Ursula Von Leyen, President of the European Commission, welcomed the agreement and explained that it "will allow data to flow between the EU and the US in a predictable and reliable way while balancing security, the right to privacy and data protection". For his part, Biden predicts that this agreement will have an impact of 7.1 billion dollars (around 6.45 billion euros), but neither of the two leaders gave more details on how it will differ from the two previous agreements.

 

Brussels and Washington had been negotiating a new agreement for two years since the European court suspended the previous one, following a complaint that Austrian lawyer Max Schrems filed against Facebook (now Meta), claiming that US laws did not offer the same protection as the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg's company threatened to leave the EU market if the two blocs did not reach an agreement to allow the transfer