Facebook's European data transfers under scrutiny

An influential privacy activist is pressing European Union officials to halt Facebook's data flows from Europe to the US. Austrian Max Schrems sent a letter to the data protection agency in Ireland -- where Facebook has its European headquarters -- arguing that the authority should “suspend all data flows from 'Facebook Ireland Ltd' to 'Facebook Inc.'" Schrems is the same activist that got the European courts to cancel a major US-EU data transfer agreement months ago. The European Court of Justice invalidated the long-standing “Safe Harbor” agreement -- which allowed thousands of companies to legally transfer Europeans’ data to the US -- over concerns about US surveillance programs. Schrems argued that Facebook is subject to those same surveillance programs and thus should not be allowed to move European data across the Atlantic Ocean.

“There is clear evidence that leads me to believe that my personal data, controlled by ‘Facebook Ireland Ltd,’ and processed by ‘Facebook Inc,’ is at the very least ‘made available’ to US government authorities under various known and unknown legal provisions and spy programs,” he wrote. In the wake of the court decision, companies fearing that European data protection agencies may come after them moved to house more of their customer information in EU-only data centers. Other tech industry giants, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, could also receive the same scrutiny in the near future, Schrems added.