October 7, 2022

President Joe Biden signed an executive order to implement a new framework to protect the privacy of personal data shared between the U.S. and Europe, the White House announced Friday.

The new framework fills a significant gap in data protections across the Atlantic since a European court undid a previous version in 2020. The court found the U.S. had too great an ability to surveil European data transferred through the earlier system.

The court case, known as Schrems II, "created enormous uncertainty about the ability of companies to transfer personal data from the European Union to the United States in a manner consistent with EU law," then-Deputy Assistant Commerce Secretary James Sullivan wrote in a public letter shortly after the decision. The outcome made it so U.S. companies would need to use different "EU-approved data transfer mechanisms" on an ad hoc basis, creating more complexity for businesses, Sullivan wrote.

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