Abstract
Today’s business is dependent on information; information about an individual’s financial wealth, education, purchasing preferences and even health conditions. How companies treat the information, or data, they accumulate from individuals is governed by the laws in which they are incorporated and operate. Unfortunately, these laws often conflict especially when an American business is operating in Europe. This conflict led the European Commission to develop data privacy principles known as the Safe Harbor Directive, which if followed allowed US companies to store and use EU customer data. However, a lawsuit challenging the legitimacy of the Safe Harbor’s privacy protections for EU citizens resulted in a 2015 ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that invalidated the Safe Harbor Directive. The chaos that resulted from this ruling sent businesses on both sides of the Atlantic scrambling for an alternative. Unfortunately, Brexit has made an extremely complex legal and business situation even more complicated. Brexit raises two important questions concerning the EU’s recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor Directive that this paper will address: 1) what impact will the UK’s decision to leave the EU have on the newly enacted Privacy Shield and 2) what data privacy measures will the UK implement when it is no longer part of the EU?
Keywords
Brexit, Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield, data, privacy, GDPR
Chinese Abstract
英国退欧对英国数据隐私政策及欧盟隐私保护的影响
当今的商业发展高度依赖信息，如个人的财政状况、教育程度、购物喜好甚至健康状况等等。公司对于由个人处收集而来的信息和数据的整合和操作受到相关行业法律的监管。然而，这些法律常产生矛盾，在美国公司于欧盟国家经营时尤为突出。这些矛盾促使欧盟委员会制定了数据隐私保护的相关政策—安全港原则，允许美国公司储存并使用欧盟顾客的数据资料。然而，一起质疑其对欧盟居民隐私保护合法性的诉讼案迫使欧盟法院于2015年废除了安全港原则。此裁定引发的混乱局面令大西洋两岸的公司纷纷寻求其他方案。不幸的是，英国退欧使本已经极度复杂的法律和商业局面更加复杂。退欧引发了两项有关欧盟近期废除安全港原则的重要问题，本文将对此将作讨论：第一，英国决定退欧对近期颁布的隐私保护条例有何影响？第二，当不再是欧盟的一份子时，英国将采取何种数据隐私保护措施？
关键词：英国退欧，安全港，隐私保护条例，数据，隐私，欧盟数据保护条例
DOI
10.5038/2640-6489.3.1.1027
Recommended Citation
Vroman, M. E., & Johnson, C. W. (2018). Brexit’s effect on the UK’s data privacy policy and the EU Privacy Shield. International Interdisciplinary Business-Economics Advancement Journal, 3(1), 28-39. https://www.doi.org/10.5038/2640-6489.3.1.1027
Creative Commons License
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