An Explosive Combination of Safe Harbor and Brexit

Last year the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the Safe-harbor scheme was deemed to not provide an adequate level of protection under the European data protection law.

After discussion between the interested parties the safe-harbor scheme will now be replaced by a scheme called “EU – US Privacy Shield”   Both the European Union and the United States are in discussion and will outlay the transition from the current safe-harbor scheme to the new EU-US Privacy Shield scheme. The European Commission is predicting that it will take three months for the authorities to finalise and implement the new scheme, meaning that the EU- US Privacy shield scheme could come into play by May 2016

What will this mean if the UK vote “no” in June this year?

This could all become irrelevant if the UK go down the brexit route and vote “no” in the EU referendum in June this year.

The UK would then reside outside the European Union and would require its own variant of the EU- US privacy shield in order to continue business relations with the rest of Europe.
With the combination of the new EU – US Privacy Shield scheme and the Snoopers’ charter agreement that is currently being pushed through parliament there could be a complete ban on the transfer of data between the UK and the EU,  whilst a new policy is put in place, which would have a severe impact on the economy.

 

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