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Max Schrems on the EU court ruling that could cut Facebook in two

Last months ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union , ripping up the EU-US Privacy Shield and sewing doubt over alternative mechanisms, has put a cat among the pigeons of international data transfers.

Eponymous privacy campaigner Max Schrems underlying complaint targeted the tech giants use of a data transfer tool known as Standard Contractual Clauses . Thousands of businesses make use of SCCs to carry out EU to US transfers of personal data, sometimes in addition to the now defunct Privacy Shield framework.

In Schrems views the only way Facebook will be able to comply with the CJEU ruling is if it splits its infrastructure into two.

And while other types of companies such as cloud storage providers may already separate data by regions owing to factors like latency or even cost, Facebooks business simply doesnt operate like that.

Facebook is probably the most to all of this, says Schrems, discussing the ramifications of the CJEU ruling in an interview with TechCrunch.

A bit like Diaspora was always designed to be; a federated social network where you basically have different parts and whats necessary is communicated and whats not necessary is not communicated.

Schrems points to what happened historically with SWIFT financial data exchanges as a comparable scenario where the fix was to move backups from the US to Switzerland so only the data that is international and US is actually stored in the US and all the other transfer data is kept in Belgium and Switzerland.

Beyond a massive engineering headache for the company, Schrems doesnt see huge legal significance in a federated version of Facebooks service that holds EU users data in Europe.

Whats kind of interesting in some countries not all the credit ranking agencies and what they do and why they think they can have data on every European and their financial situation without ever having consent or anything.

Original article
Author: Natasha Lomas

TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

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