Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (“DPC”), their equivalent of our ICO, sent a draft decision to its EU counterparts a few days ago, in which it proposes to halt Facebook’s parent company Meta from transferring personal data from the EU to the US. If approved by EU’s other Data Protection Authorities (“DPA” – sorry for all the abbreviations!), this could see Facebook and Instagram effectively turned off in the EU.
This all stems from the “Schems II” decision, where Privacy Shield was deemed invalid. DPC, which generally leads on issues relating to EU-US data protection, started its own enquiry and took the view that SCC’s were not an adequate replacement, which we have mentioned before.
In the light of the new draft EU-US data transfer deal, this might not be so impactful, but it could have the benefit of encouraging the draft agreement to be finalised more quickly.
As with all things EU, we are not included, but the UK certainly will need something akin to the EU-US data transfer deal, but there is no news of if and when we might get this.