The Irish High Court ruled Friday (14) that the country’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) can continue to enforce the data transfer ban, prohibiting Facebook (FB-US) from transferring EU data to the United States.
The DPC issued an interim order last August that Facebook’s server computing mechanism for transferring EU user data to the U.S. was “prohibited in practice be used”.
The Irish High Court’s decision was highly publicized by EU privacy advocates and multinational technology companies. After the news broke, Facebook immediately warned that the DPC order would cause “devastating” and “irreversible” harm to the company’s business, but the Irish High Court said on the same day that it refused to allow Facebook to seek any legal remedy and also rejected the claims made in the proceedings. The claim was dismissed.
The DPC’s data transfer ban on Facebook was proposed after the EU Supreme Court annulled the Privacy Shield data transfer protection agreement with the U.S. in July last year, when the EU Supreme Court held that the U.S. could not provide personal data privacy protection to the EU public, and thus decided to annul the agreement.
Even if the Irish High Court ruling comes out, the order does not take effect immediately, and Facebook will have time to respond until September. But in any case, the DPC will act in coordination with the other 26 EU regulators to take the necessary measures.
The EU has been negotiating a new privacy agreement with the U.S. since last year’s repeal of the Privacy Shield agreement with the U.S., which is expected to be an opportunity for Facebook to turn the tide, although the negotiations will still take several months to complete.
If the final agreement cannot be reached, in the most extreme case, Facebook faces two difficult choices: one is to spend a lot of money to establish a large server center in Europe to handle European user data, and the other is to simply give up the European market.
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