We self-certify compliance with:

You may have heard some rumblings last week about Safe Harbor and EU data collection.

Here is the scoop and what it means for you:

A Court in the EU ruled this past week that the Safe Harbor data protection framework was invalid and, thus, made the Safe Harbor program that thousands of other companies in the US (including Marden-Kane) use obsolete.

Safe Harbor was the US government sanctioned privacy program that allows personal data of EU residents to be collected, transferred and stored by US companies outside the EU countries.

Basically, the decision was based on EU judges viewing that Safe Harbor didn’t give the same data protection as data laws in the EU. Since Safe Harbor was deemed too lenient by these judges in comparison, they decided it wasn’t adequate.

The US government is said to be “deeply disappointed” in this decision and is working hard to rollout an updated Safe Harbor program ASAP. It is being reported that a commission has already been appointed, but since Safe Harbor 2.0 has been in the works for over 2 years it is not happening overnight…

The next steps for the legal world is to: 1) rollout Safe Harbor 2.0 ASAP, and 2) secure a possible grace period for the current Safe Harbor framework given the nature of this sudden decision.

For US companies currently running promotions that collect or transfer EU data the recommendation is to: 1) start assessing the scope of the data transfers, types of data, the level of risk, the data flows, etc, and 2) initiate discussions with clients/vendors about Safe Harbor and current/future EU data.

There are alternative solutions that can be used until a new Safe Harbor program is put into place and Marden-Kane can help. If you have a promotion that you want to run in the EU in the near future, contact us and we can find a data solution for your EU program.

To read more posts by Marden-Kane, please visit our main blog page or subscribe to our email list.