Safe (Harbour) is dead
On Tuesday, 6th October this year, Austrian law student, Max Schrems, successfully won his case in the European Union's top court. Safe Harbour was declared as invalid and unsafe. And it all comes crashing down. To be fair there was concerns about Safe Harbour for some time and attempts to patch it have been made and are under way. What is Safe Harbour anyway and why do we care? Our personal information has various protections across the world (or none). In the EU we have the Data Protection Directive. When we pass over personal information to companies we expect it to be used for the intended purpose we gave it for, to be kept safe and not to be passed on to others without our knowledge and consent, for example to marketing companies. The EU directive explicitly states that everyone has the right to have their personal information protected but this is not always the case when the company or your information is located internationally. Safe Harbour was introduced to try protect EU...