Private data security

EU wants US companies to report intelligence agency data access requests

The European Union wants U.S. businesses to report when U.S. intelligence agencies request access to data they hold about Europeans; the reporting is one of the conditions EU negotiators are imposing for signature of a new Safe Harbor agreement.

Since Edward Snowden's revelations about the U.S. surveillance of Internet traffic, European Commission officials have been negotiating better privacy protection for Europeans' personal information transferred to the U.S. But since the Court of Justice of the EU struck down the 2000 Safe Harbor data transfer agreement last month, the negotiations have become more urgent. More than 4000 U.S. companies relied on the agreement to process Europeans' data, either for their own use or in order to deliver services to European businesses, and although other legal mechanisms exist allowing them to continue operations, those mechanisms are also increasingly falling under suspicion.