Victory for tech giants on EU data laws

Google, Facebook and other US tech giants have won an important victory against European Union efforts to restrict the sharing of customer data after UK Prime Minister David Cameron persuaded the bloc to postpone the introduction of tougher privacy rules by at least a year.

The delay will give US companies – as well as the Obama administration, which has been frantically lobbying for the reforms to be watered down – the opportunity to make their case more forcefully once the attention shifts away from the US spy scandal, said some EU officials and privacy advocates. “It looks like we won,” said an executive at a large US tech company. “When we saw the story about Merkel’s phone being tapped and that 35 leaders’ phones were also compromised, we thought we were going to lose . . . Britain’s common sense prevailed.”