Europe’s Privacy Watchdogs Call for Changes to US Data-Transfer Deal

Only two months after the European Union’s top policy makers agreed to a hard-won data-sharing pact with United States officials, the bloc’s national privacy regulators said that the deal did not go far enough to safeguard the personal information of Internet users in Europe.

The agreement, the so-called EU-US Privacy Shield, which would allow companies to continue sending personal data back and forth across the Atlantic, is still widely expected to be ratified by early summer. But by sounding the alarm over the current deal, national privacy watchdogs from France, Germany and other European Union member states have served notice that American companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon could face protracted country-by-country legal battles. The regulators say they worry that companies could misuse data, including information from search engine queries and social media posts. They also say they fear that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies might gain access to European citizens’ personal information without sufficient safeguards in place. “From the outside, it must look like Europe can’t speak with one voice on privacy,” said Patrick van Eecke, a data protection lawyer at DLA Piper in Brussels. “This is becoming kind of a circus.”