The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg will today start assessing a lawsuit from Austrian data-protection activist Max Schrems against Facebook. The case questions how far European subsidiaries of non-European internet giants such as Facebook have to comply with European fundamental-rights standards. This case follows two landmark rulings last year on data retention and against the search engine Google on the 'right to be forgotten'.
MEP Birgit Sippel, S&D spokesperson on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, said:
"The issue here is about protecting European Facebook users from the US intelligence agencies' obsessive data collection regime."
Facebook users who have an account in the European Union are clients of an Irish sub-company of Facebook. Yet, European data is still stored on US servers. The revelations in the Snowden case, among others, made clear that US intelligence agencies have almost no limits in accessing this highly sensitive data. This is why Max Schrems lodged a complaint with the Irish data-protection supervisor. The latter, however, rejected a review of the complaint, arguing that the European Commission's so-called Safe Harbor decision had already established that the handling of such data is to be regarded as safe.
Birgit Sippel continued:
"The so-called Safe Harbor decision does not create a safe harbour for data – it has certainly not done so by now. Even before the NSA scandal, the European Socialists and Democrats had called for a review of the decision. Since the Snowden case has revealed the unlimited access the NSA has to the servers of US companies, we have demanded the immediate suspension of Safe Harbor.
"The European Commission has already been working on a reform of the controversial decision, but, so far, the results have been poor. The ECJ decision could send a strong signal."
At the moment, it is not clear when the ECJ's decision can be expected.
