US Supreme Court Just Blew Up EU-US Data Transfers

(noyb.eu)

153 points | by tomwas54 4 hours ago ago

75 comments

  • manueltgomes an hour ago

    Switching to EU companies is often the solution, but also we're in a tricky position in Europe since alternatives exist but can't compete with US. So finding European alternatives is possible but hard. Also EU is doing its job enforcing privacy and anti-competition laws but then American companies just say "feature not available in EU" (like Apple is doing more and more for example), making things even harder to switch. Like nick mentioned, even EU official sites use CloudFront so it's a tricky process.

    • rdsubhas a few seconds ago

      Yeah the problem with EU is that once "compliance" becomes the only reason, lethargy kicks in. Their players stop competing because they have no incentive to, the compliance will keep them afloat.

      I would assume the same here. If they are forced to move to EU just because of compliance, the alternatives would remain poor quality.

    • CalRobert 12 minutes ago

      European companies just ignore privacy and make their lawyers write increasingly contorted cya statements. I’ve worked in several and the idea we shouldn’t be using American hyperscalers (remember, the CLOUD act means hosting in Europe is useless) gets laughs.

    • shevy-java 18 minutes ago

      This is even worse. For instance, in a medical university, we recently were told we need a smartphone and install an app from Google store (!!!), in order to read emails sent out by officials at the medical university. I protested to that but they had a deal already with the private company and their signature meant they had to keep on being addicted to that private company, so now I am locked out of receiving emails since for redirect you also need to have that app installed once. I don't have a smartphone though and I find it outrageous that people are forced to install it AND forced to use Google Store, for publicly funded (!!!) universities here in central Europe. Some lobbyists are currently getting very rich. I call it theft of taxpayer's money though.

      • dgellow 10 minutes ago

        What country? Which university?

      • tempfile 9 minutes ago

        I don't know where you are, and I'm not an expert, but a job requiring specific technology typically means it is your employer's responsibility to provide that technology. So if they signed a contract that mandates you have a smartphone, you can use your own if you like, but I think they are legally required to provide you with one if you choose not to buy one. In fact in most cases, I think they should prefer that (since the security of your personal device is very much none of their business).

        I think this is kind of a ticking time bomb with a lot of companies depending on personal devices for 2FA.

        • soco 2 minutes ago

          "après moi le déluge" - said every public sector purchase decision maker ever.

      • soco 3 minutes ago

        Which is exactly the point of the whole "sovereignty" debate: on one hand there's a lot of slop about "national interest" and "privacy" and "features" and such, and on the other hand management decides for whoever offers something (anything) cheaper and with a golf tournament on top. And then everybody moans and complains about the situation.

  • amarant an hour ago

    Doing business with the US is just impossible these days. If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners.

    I'm really not sure what consequences that'll have for the rest of the world, but it looks like we're about to find out

    • recursive-call an hour ago

      pariah: outcast, disliked

      piranha: carnivorous fish

      • Etheryte an hour ago

        Also piranha: Brazilian Portugese slang for hooker.

      • mistersquid 22 minutes ago

        > piranha: carnivorous fish

        Nice callout.

        Neither here nor there, but many (most?) fish are carnivorous.

      • IncreasePosts 16 minutes ago

        paraná: a state/river in southern Brazil

      • rusk an hour ago

        Sounds right

    • rusk an hour ago

      The concern is not so much that the US will lose friends moreso that other business partners will become more prominent. The US has a lot of social capital to burn. I’m not certain that somebody hasn’t calculated how much they can get away with…

    • coffe2mug 44 minutes ago

      Sadly nothing will change.

      - Pretty sure a large number of politicians are using claude, chatGPT etc.

      - Majority of researchers in EU are dependent of all of US SV companies. There are nothing equivalent. EVen if there is mistral or other open source llms - every damn Uni/company is uploading everything to claude or open AI or gemini.

      - Majority see these but just move on

      - 99% of EU politicians either dont care or show apathy or worse live in a moat

      - Ideally EU could have forced iphone, Google to openup. They did not.

      - Same with taxation. Ireland fights EU to give tax breaks

      - Its f*king broken system

    • drstewart an hour ago

      > If this trend continues any further the US is gonna end up a piranha state with no allies and no business partners

      Sure it is, sure it is. Very plausible thing that will definitely happen. Any day now, I'm sure.

      Meanwhile, in the real world: https://www.luxtimes.lu/europeanunion/eu-lawmakers-approve-u...

      Who WILL become a pariah state is the EU as they continue to antagonize the biggest economies in the world: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/29/eu-introduces-...

      The world is starting to shun the EU and turn to China.

      • amarant an hour ago

        I mean, if you saw the Canadian PMs speech at davos, you'd know "the west" is already distancing itself from the US. This is not a hypothetical, it has begun.

        It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night, it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect, but it is happening, and has been happening for over a year.

        • drstewart an hour ago

          A speech is the definition of a hypothetical. I can show you a million Trump speeches that "show" the opposite. Something tells me you wont take those as gospel for some reason.

          >It's not like trade deals are ripped up over night

          Oh really? I thought we're ABOUT to find out what it's like to have no allies or business partners? Weird!

          >it's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect

          Ah, the magic "it's happening but I can't prove it, so trust me bro". Meanwhile, I can point you to tangible metrics showing the world is moving away from the EU to China, meaning the EU will have zero trade with anyone else in short order (trust me it's really happening).

          • 2muchcoffeeman 35 minutes ago

            False equivalency. Trump constantly says whatever he wants in plain contradiction to verifiable facts: The strait is open! We win the war! I’m not in the Epstein files!

            • drstewart 7 minutes ago

              Those may be the facts now, but not forever. It's gonna take a while to have noticeable effect. That doesn't mean what he's saying is not about to come true.

              • 2muchcoffeeman 4 minutes ago

                You mean that one day all the Epstein files will change to no longer contain countless mentions of Trump?

                How do you supposed this will happen? Through destruction of evidence or the invention of a Time Machine to warn his younger self?

    • vlian2088 40 minutes ago

      the other ~~subsidiary of AIPAC~~ party will be in power again in less than 3 years and everything will go back to business as usual. a divorce from the US is the last thing the EU really wants.

      • roysting 18 minutes ago

        What the EU wants is irrelevant. The EU is a derivative, a function, a dependency of the entity we still call the USA.

        The EU having some leash on some matters that are not only irrelevant to the entity we call US and even serves a purpose for the entity called the USA, should not be confused with freedom to want or not to want. The EU does as it is steered to do by the groomed and placed puppets orchestrating the installed system.

  • nickslaughter02 an hour ago

    Europa, the official web portal of the tech sovereign European Union, will have to change their CDN provider (Amazon's CloudFront).

    https://europa.eu

    • AndroTux 26 minutes ago

      So will https://wero-wallet.eu - you know, the European alternative to VISA/MasterCard.

    • hahahaa 15 minutes ago

      Can they even use a CDN now?

      • dgellow 9 minutes ago

        We have European CDNs

    • cesaref 28 minutes ago

      Unless that site collects personal information, it's fine isn't it? This isn't about where stuff is hosted, it's about privacy.

  • Chu4eeno 3 hours ago

    I wonder how many billions in lobbying money Schrems has cost various big companies.

    The treaties and deals he has managed to torpedo by forcing courts to uphold privacy laws is insane (and impressive).

  • seydor an hour ago

    The EU keeps trying to manifest the missing european data infrastructure via data regulation instead of outright bans and limits on american companies, the way China did it.

    • bambax an hour ago

      The EU should cut all ties with the US, tax US products and impose costly (and difficult to get) visas to American citizens wanting to visit.

      It won't do any of this because it has no balls and no vision.

      We're doomed and it's our fault.

      • CalRobert 9 minutes ago

        Alternately, it should roll out the red carpet for American entrepreneurs, scientists, and talent who want to try moving here and having a go of things in Europe. The Dutch American Friendship Treaty accidentally enables this and has become quite popular, but is only for one country.

      • AndroTux 23 minutes ago

        They should, but the entire EU economy runs on US clouds. It's hard enough to get new hardware as it is (US hardware btw), so how should the EU, especially today, move to sovereign clouds within the next few years?

        I'd argue every single EU business with more than five employees would be impacted by such a decision. Just pulling the plug would be economic suicide.

        • hahahaa 10 minutes ago

          Time to dust off that sampling profiler and make code way more efficient, simple and well architected.

      • rusk 43 minutes ago

        > no balls and no vision

        Seems to me they’re waiting it out. Everything could change in a presidential election and the European economy wins either way. It is an economic bloc after all.

        What you describe would be what’s called “cutting off your nose to spite your face”

        • GolfPopper 34 minutes ago

          The problem with "everything could change in a presidential election" is that offers no stability. No one wants to plan around "maybe the United States goes rabid again in four years".

        • BlueTemplar a minute ago

          For the worst, you mean ?

          The current arrangement has been torpedoed a long time ago already, with the Patriot Act (2001) (though it took many years to understand the extent of it).

        • watwut 29 minutes ago

          > Everything could change in a presidential election

          A lot can change, but not everything. Trump won twice and republican elites are fully behind him. Even if he looses, the same ideologies will continue. It happened twice, it is not a fluke but a permanent property of American politics.

          Moreover, constitutional changes supreme court created are structural change. They will be super hard to undone - first they would need to change supreme court composition. The influence of money in American politics will just grow, the structural advantages of conservatives have in voting system will just grow and next conservative president will have even more space for maneuvering. (Non conservative one will likely be stopped by supreme court on some excuse.)

          So, basically, outside of change actual constitution which is impossible, it will stay the same at best in the long term.

          • rusk 8 minutes ago

            I agree with everything you have written here, however even in the face of that it makes “economic” sense for the EU to wait it out.

      • drstewart 38 minutes ago

        Europeans should cut ties with their own fascist, Russian sympathizers leading the polls first, then worry about Americans.

        • dgellow 4 minutes ago

          We can and should do both at the same time

    • sublimefire 12 minutes ago

      Privacy laws are actually one of the very useful things that came out. It is difficult to do the same in the US because of the business lobby. It is crazy that US citizens data can be purchased in the “black” market and the used by the agencies. Leaving tech companies to self regulate is just not viable and it is proven time and time again they cannot do it.

    • armchairhacker 31 minutes ago

      Outright bans would destroy European companies that rely on American companies. First they need to build their own infrastructure (which China has done).

    • jimbob45 an hour ago

      Ban, limits, and regulation won’t solve a country with too many worker protections. The EU simply can’t compete in the modern globalized world.

      • barnabee 22 minutes ago

        The only answer isn't to sink to the lowest common denominator.

        Ban or tax things from the "globalised" world that are just worker/societal/environmental protection arbitrage so they're competing for the EU market on a level playing field, then we'll see who can compete.

        The EU is plenty big enough to be self-sufficient if it has to and shouldn't be afraid of risking this if abusive and exploitative companies from other places don't way to pay their way.

      • dgellow 4 minutes ago

        The EU isn’t a country, which is exactly why things are lacking vision and feel confusing. The EU is actually too decentralized and fragmented for its own good, contrary to what people whine about. We need more federalism, and an actual single market

      • 0dayz 40 minutes ago

        It's more simple than that; lack of investment due to various factors among which some are due to regulations, but also because the lower ROI you get in the USA due to corporate culture, higher cost in general (wages, energy, resources, manufacturing, etc.), slower economic growth and so on.

      • hgtt664868 an hour ago

        slashing worker protections would do what exactly?

        • CalRobert 7 minutes ago

          Tbf it could reduce hiring friction and make it easier to take a chance on a riskier hire. Also makes it easier for workers to change jobs, notice periods here can be outright insane (3 months in some cases) and even as an employee I hated them.

        • eecc 41 minutes ago

          free the "animal spirits"?

          /s

      • geraneum an hour ago

        Reduced worker protections -[somehow]-> better worker output. /s

        • eecc 40 minutes ago

          the [somehow] is pretty clear: exploitative working conditions.

  • atoav 3 hours ago

    As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.

    If it was me that deal would have never came to be. If some EU entity decides to use Microsoft 365 can Microsoft guarantee that it won't give access to one US government agency or another? It really can't. Because if that EU entity wants to act in accordance with EU law, this matters. This is what that deal was for. Basically the EU saying "it is okay" although it never really was okay.

    IMO we in the EU need to finally start doing our own stuff that adheres to our own laws and isn't subject to the whims of a mad king. Public Money, Public Code.

    • nickslaughter02 43 minutes ago

      > As a European citizen I do not trust entities located in the US to not abuse my private data ever since the patriot act.

      EU is working on mandating scans of all your private encrypted messages right now. EU data protection is marketing for the gullible.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707719

      • jeroenhd 10 minutes ago

        A small group of people from the EU parliament is going against the wishes of the EU commission in an attempt to force through a change that contains a subsection of the bill that tries to mandate E2EE scanning.

        The way this is going is definitely worrying, but what you're saying is disingenous at best.

        Furthermore, even if this passes somehow, that doesn't change the fact that the US remains an unreliable partner. Now we have two governments scouring through your data instead of one.

    • rixed 2 hours ago

      Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?

      It's well overdue to take seriously and put all our efforts behind the many (various but little known) local-first initiatives.

      See for instance: https://elfaconsortium.eu/ It's a race against time.

      • frereubu an hour ago

        > Who do you want to abuse your private data then? Some administration closer to home?

        This is a very bad-faith question. If you want people to take you seriously, at least give them the respect of trying to argue with a strong, good-faith interpretation of what they're saying.

  • jhanschoo 3 hours ago

    For the skimmer/TL;DR'er, note that this article is by an advocacy group presenting their analysis of a situation, and then advocating and taking action on it: "Next Steps: Commission must repeal EU-US deal. noyb ..."

    It is not reporting on an opinion of a representative or proxy of the European Commission.

    • eesmith 2 hours ago

      For the skimmer, the advocacy group was founded by Maximilian Schrems, whose legal cases first got the European Court of Justice to overturn the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles (which described how a US company could legally store private data on EU citizens), and then got the ECJ to overturn EU–US Privacy Shield, which replaced the Safe Harbor principles.

      These decisions are known as Schrems I and Schrems II after the founder of this advocacy group.

      The newest version of that data transfer framework is called the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework. The European Commission deemed it sufficient, in no small part because they considered it (and more specifically the Data Protection Review Court, an extrajudicial executive branch tribunal) sufficiently independent of the president.

      However, in January 2025, Trump fired the Democrat members of the review court, leaving it unable to reach quorum to make decisions, which highlighted it wasn't all that independent. Now it's clearly not independent.

      I don't see how a Schrems III is not in the works.

      • maratc 31 minutes ago

        You could both be right: Shrems III could be in the works, and TLA could be presenting their legal analysis as an established fact.

        In other words, (a) no, the "US Supreme Court" didn't "Just Bl[ow] Up EU-US Data Transfers" – there's nothing in the decision even remotely addressing the transfers (nor the EU!) – but (b) the situation might progress in that direction (or it might not.)

  • shevy-java 20 minutes ago

    So the US Supreme Court is doing here more and better for EU citizens (!!!) than the EU commission and EU courts are. Because the EU officials constantly keep on lying to EU citizens how our data is safe in the USA, which it clearly is not, even aside from Trump's brown shirts, the ICE snipers that have already killed US citizens in shootings. The world is a very strange place, but one good thing is that Trump's criminal gangster organisation has not undermined the whole US court system yet. And he is now too old and too demented to do so, so they will rally behind hugely uncharismatic losers such as eyeliner-boy "can't stop it with my make-up" Vance or "I change my opinion all the time" Mr. Rubio.

    A big loser team.

    • jeroenhd 2 minutes ago

      The US supreme court is correcting the lies the American government made when they assured the EU and its citizens that they can be trusted with their data. It's not just the EU lying, both sides are awful at this.

      I don't know why the EU wants to trust the USA so bad, it's clearly unwise. It makes sense, because banning EU companies from using AWS/GCP/etc. would bankrupt the EU into a recession, but the way they're going about these things is very annoying.

      That said, if the USA would actually keep its promises and adopt legislation that solves the reasons why the EU cannot give out a decent competency decision, the problem would go away entirely.

      The Biden administration set up a precarious body within the government to resolve the issue rather than go through the normal lawmaking process, probably because it wouldn't go through.

  • xiphias2 an hour ago

    EU needs to decide if it wants to do data processing or not.

    If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.

    If no, it needs to transfer data to US for training/inferencing on it.

    • joe_mamba an hour ago

      >If it’s a yes, it needs datacenters and get a lot more energy.

      It can outsource its data centers abroad too like it did with its manufacturing industry.

    • ShinyLeftPad an hour ago

      or wait for the bubble to burst and come out on top.

      • noosphr 39 minutes ago

        The internet is a fad and will pass any day now.

        • general1465 3 minutes ago

          Current AI companies with trillion USD valuations, models which costed them billions USD to train and now have total addressable market few hundred approved entities are very close to being a fad.

      • drstewart an hour ago

        This. The US is playing the right move with solar panels, wait for the bubble to burst and then swoop in. Let China take the early losses.

        • hahahaa 7 minutes ago

          Lol that is like saying let's wait AI out, not build fabs, TMSC will sell em cheap in 2030!