No more Safe Harbour…or Harbor

News and information from the Advent IM team.

European Court of Justice has ruled that transatlantic data sharing agreement is invalid. What does this mean for UK businesses that utilise US datacentres or Cloud services?

Advent IM Director Mike Gillespie, “There are issues arising from this ruling that require the urgent attention of UK businesses and they need to be aware of the legislative implications of how they plan to store and manage data”.

For some time now, hosting companies, system support and system management companies, contact centres and most recently cloud providers have been selling their services, some or all of which reside in the US, into the EU. These companies have consistently cited Safe Harbor as the assurance that EU citizen data would be afforded the commensurate level of protection that it would receive from an EU/EEA member state.

The inception of Safe Harbor predates the US Patriot Act, legislation which, many people feel made a nonsense of Safe Harbor. This has been widely documented and discussed by Data Protection practitioners for some time now and, whilst there have been ongoing negotiations, the European Commission appears to have made little progress. Meanwhile any EU Citizen data resident in US servers remained vulnerable to release to US authorities.

In one fell and rather final swoop, the Court removed the blanket approval for data transfers to the US. This now allows for individual national Data Protection Authorities (ICO in UK) to scrutinise any proposed transfers to ensure that transfers guarantee the rights to privacy and freedom from surveillance afforded each of us by the Charter.

Of course one way to attempt to get round the issue could be by following the EU Model Clauses route, an option often deployed by organisations in the past wanting to transfer data to/allow data processing in non-EEA or other trustworthy countries ie India. This option required the inclusion of a series of model clauses into contracts which effectively bind the Data Processor to abide by the principles of EU Data Protection. However, which takes precedence, contract law or the Patriot Act? Can a commercial contact ensure the privacy of EU Citizens personal data and guarantee it to be free from disclosure to US Authorities? This seems highly unlikely.

A further option could be implementing Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) which are “designed to allow multinational companies to transfer personal data from the EEA to their affiliates located outside of the EEA”. So far so good as this sounds just the ticket especially for multinational hosting providers and cloud computing providers?

However for BCRs to work, applicants must demonstrate that their BCRs “put in place adequate safeguards for protecting personal data throughout the organisation”.

How can any company hosting data inside the US offer this? In reality they probably cannot.

The truth is, EU Citizens data protection cannot be guaranteed once it’s transferred to the US, this has been acknowledged so finally that the EU Commission and member states’ Data Protection Authorities have an imperative to do something about it.

The fallout from the decision is yet to be felt but could have far reaching for some organisations. The ICO has been at pains to point out that the ruling does not mean there is an increase in threat to people’s personal data. However, companies will need to review how they ensure that data transferred to the US complies with legislation. Safe Harbor was not the only regulation available for transfers between the US and EU but it was the most widely used.

So what does this mean in the short term? Immediately little will probably happen. The ICO are considering the judgement and will be issuing guidance in due course. A new Safe Harbor agreement is also currently being negotiated between the EU and US, and has been in negotiation for the last two years, following the Snowden revelations. Once various authorities have cogitated over the ruling we will then need to assess the full impact on organisations moving forward as more guidance is released. In the meantime, a review of current practices is recommended by those organisations transferring data to the US.

Issued:  08.10.15                             Ends                                     Ref: safeharbor-01-Advent -MG

NOTES TO EDITORS

About Advent IM

Advent IM is an independent specialist consultancy, focusing on holistic security management solutions for information, people and physical assets, across both the public and private sectors. Established in 2002, Advent IM is a centre of excellence for security services, promoting the benefits of best practice guidelines and standards and the need to address risk management to protect against potential threats.
From its offices in the Midlands and London, its Consultants work nationwide and are members of the CESG Listed Advisor Scheme (CLAS), Institute of Information Security Professionals (IISP), The Security Institute (SyI), Business Continuity Institute and British Computer Society.

Consultants are also Lead Auditors for the International standard for information security management (ISO 27001) and business continuity management (ISO 22301), Practitioners of PRINCE2, a recognised project management methodology widely used within the public sector, CISSP qualified and Home Office trained physical security assessors.

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