Biden order promises better data privacy for citizens of the EU

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday designed to allay European concerns that U.S. intelligence agencies are illegally spying on them. It promises strengthened safeguards against data collection abuses and creates a forum for legal challenges.

The order builds on a preliminary agreement Biden announced in March with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a bid to end a yearslong battle over the safety of EU citizens’ data that tech companies store in the U.S.

But the European privacy campaigner who triggered the battle wasn’t satisfied it resolved core issues and warned of more legal wrangling.

The reworked Privacy Shield “includes a robust commitment to strengthen the privacy and civil liberties safeguards for signals intelligence, which should ensure the privacy of EU personal data,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters.

“It also requires the establishment of a multilayer redress mechanism with independent and binding authority for EU individuals to seek redress if they believe they are unlawfully targeted by U.S. intelligence activities,” she added.

Washington and Brussels have long been at odds over the friction between the European Union’s stringent data privacy rules and the comparatively lax regime in the U.S., which lacks a federal privacy law. That has created uncertainty for tech giants including Google and Facebook’s parent company Meta, raising the prospect that U.S. tech firms might need to keep European data out of the U.S.

Industry groups largely welcomed Biden’s order but European consumer rights and privacy campaigners, including activist Max Schrems, whose complaint kicked off the legal battle a decade earlier, were skeptical about whether it goes far enough and could end up in the bloc’s top court again.