E.U. And U.S. Release Details on Trans-Atlantic Data Transfer Deal | Hacker News Reader

E.U. And U.S. Release Details on Trans-Atlantic Data Transfer Deal

nytimes.com

54 pointswoodymcpecks10 comments

> Penny Pritzker, the United States commerce secretary, said in an interview in February. “The challenge was to show Europe how our system works, because we don’t have a single overriding privacy law.”

There's no single law overriding, because the USA has no privacy protection at all. It only cares about military and cooperate protection. The USA is acting under military powers against foreigners and under martial law against their own civilians (NDAA, Patroit Act, USA Freedom Act, FAA, ...) when they see fit. It's no challenge at all to show Europe how your system works, because we know that you don't care at all about privacy and give all illegally snooped private information to various US agencies acting without any oversight and sell it to the highest bidders by pointing to inacceptable terms of services which in many points violate any civil law. Under EU law unlawful civil terms of services are void. Of course there can be no overrides. When the US at some time will come back to international standards of the common and civil law and the democratic society, such trade agreements will not be needed anymore. But calling it "Safe Harbor" now is a fabrication.

“The proposal foresees no legally binding improvements. Instead, it merely relies on a declaration by the US authorities on their interpretation of the legal situation regarding surveillance by US secret services, as well as the creation of an independent but powerless Ombudsman, who would assess citizens' complaints,” Albrecht said.

Germany’s federal and regional data-protection authorities said 2015 they wouldn’t approve any new transfers of data to the U.S. — even for transfers based on arrangements different from the trans-Atlantic data-transfer pact knocked down by the European Union’s highest court.

I don't think it's correct to say the US is operating under martial law.

They're not calling it "Safe Harbor" anymore, but "Privacy Shield". </nitpicks>

Doublespeak

Ars Technica's take on the deal makes it sound completely different; http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/privacy-shield-do...

While it's good that there is debate about access to data by US security services, we should remember that there are a lot of other players in this game. Having an arrangement where EU businesses can work with US businesses and EU customers know that their data isn't being passed on to non-governmental organisations (advertisers, credit agencies, whoever) once it's outside the European safeguards is still helpful. How this gets audited in practice is a different question of course, but then that's true for European businesses as well.

Can someone explain why Times uses wording "E.U.", I haven't seen European Union shortened like that. It's usually just "EU". Is this some curiosity in this specific deal?

I believe the Times does that for most acronyms as part of their style guide. For example, they also write FBI as F.B.I. The exception is acronyms that are pronounced as words instead of initials (like NASA or NATO).

The Times uses periods for initialisms (where you say each letter individually) but not for acronyms (where you say the word the initials spell).

That said, I think the Times style looks terrible in most typefaces, and that such extraneous punctuation should just be eliminated. Ms Jones, a CPA who worked at the FBI in the 90s, agrees with me.

It's primarily American English, as far as I know, hence it may be a bit more foreign and unusual to those of us in the EU.

Somebody explain to me why 1/3 of the planet is not a big enough area to do business in ? (EU, USA)

EDIT: maybe for some import goods ?

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