How The Safe Harbor Deal Can Affect Your Data Security

The Safe Harbor deal is a particular agreement that was drafted in accordance with both the United States Department of Commerce and the European Union. Safe Harbor is designed to regulate the way that companies based in the United States are supposed to either export or handle the personal data of clients or colleagues who may be European citizens. The Internet has accomplished a great many things in a relatively short amount of time, including making the world a much smaller place, relatively speaking. It is now easier than ever for a company to expand its reach globally and the Safe Harbor deal was originally designed to help make this new environment a much safer place in terms of digital security.

The Pros and Cons of the Safe Harbor Deal

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the Safe Harbor deal is that it established a single set of requirements governing data protection when documents were being transferred across the borders of territories that were a part of the Safe Harbor collective. Under the deal, businesses had a legal requirement to tell people that their data was being collected. They also had to inform people how that data would be used, get their express permission to share that data with a third party and more.

Perhaps the biggest downside of Safe Harbor file sharing has to do with the current state of the deal. In October of 2015, the original terms and conditions of the deal were essentially overturned by the European Court of Justice. Rather than establishing one set of rules that all participating countries had to follow, the court decided that each country needed to determine how, where and why its citizens files and other items could be shared in a cyber environment. As one might expect, this has led to the situation becoming all the more complicated with each passing day.

How This Affects Data Transfers for Your Business

In essence, maintaining compliance when transferring information back and forth with European nations has gotten significantly more difficult since the court's decision. There is no longer a "one size fits all" rule to data security. A particular technique that may be in full compliance with the rules and regulations of Country A may be woefully inadequate for Country B, forcing businesses based in the United States to adopt.

Businesses now have to either keep track of over two dozen different regulations depending on the countries that they're dealing with, or try to come up with one set of requirements that now services all masters at once, relatively speaking. Additionally, national regulators in a particular country can now suspend a data transfer without warning if they find that the country based in the United States is not doing enough on their end to protect the sensitive information contained inside.