Happy Monday. In what appears to be a big win for American companies with European customers, the EU just approved a new agreement with the U.S. that will allow Big Tech and many smaller firms to continue to export Europeans’ personal data to American shores.
This is a last-minute reprieve for Meta, which was facing the serious possibility of having to pull Facebook and Instagram out of the EU in October because all its possible legal arguments for exporting data to the U.S. had been shot down by the EU’s Court of Justice (CJEU) and privacy regulators. Now Meta and its peers have a legal basis to keep going in Europe without having to silo off their operations there.
For now, that is. Tech industry lobbying groups like the CCIA may be hailing the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework as “durable,” but Max Schrems, the man whose fight against Facebook led the CJEU to nuke two previous EU–U.S. data-sharing agreements, says the new deal is certain to share their fate.
This long-running saga boils down to the vast powers of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the data of non-Americans that is held in American data centers, and the fact that data privacy is a fundamental right in Europe. The two previous agreements—named Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield—were shot down because they didn’t stop U.S. spies from snooping around Europeans’ data, and because Europeans had no meaningful, independent channel of complaint in the U.S. if they think their data is being misused.
Schrems, an activist lawyer who so far has an excellent record of predicting how his CJEU cases will turn out, says the new framework still falls short of adequately protecting Europeans’ data because the concessions made by the Americans don’t go far enough. He says there’s no common understanding between the two sides of what it means for the Americans to promise to keep their bulk surveillance “proportionate,” and the new U.S. body for listening to Europeans’ complaints has been set up to be a brick wall. Schrems is confident the CJEU won’t be impressed by either measure and, despite the Commission’s political imperative to keep playing nicely with the U.S., the EU legal system will doom the deal.
“We have various options for a challenge already in the drawer, although we are sick and tired of this legal Ping-Pong,” Schrems said in a statement. “We currently expect this to be back at the Court of Justice by the beginning of next year. The Court of Justice could then even suspend the new deal while it is reviewing the substance of it.”
Didier Reynders, the EU’s justice commissioner, said in a press conference today that people should “test the system before going too far in the criticism of the new system.” He also took a swipe at Schrems and his crowdfunded privacy organization, NOYB (“None of Your Business”), saying “access to the Court of Justice is part of the business model of some civil society organizations.”
But if Schrems is right, could this doomed-deal-to-replace-a-doomed-deal game just go on forever? “Yes, this could [go] on for another 100 circles,” Schrems said, unless the Commission has a change of attitude. “The last time they said there will be no deal unless there [are] major changes—now we have another, ‘Oh you slapped a new name on it and rephrased some stuff, all cool.’”
Either way, Big Tech’s European policy people get to exhale for a while—at least when it comes to being able to export Europeans’ personal data. There’s still that whole business of the CJEU blowing up the legal bases for targeted advertising in the bloc, but we can’t make things too easy now, can we?
More news below. And by the way, nominations for Fortune’s Change the World list are now open here, and for our Most Powerful Women list here.
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David Meyer
NEWSWORTHY
Telecoms lead threat. Thousands of old phone network cables are leaching lead in the U.S., and regulators and the likes of AT&T and Verizon are doing nothing about the problem, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation. This explains why, in many places in the U.S., communities continue to see dangerous lead contamination despite the country’s best efforts to remove the poisonous metal from things like paint and gasoline.
Fighting election threats. Experts are warning that disinformation will be harder to combat ahead of next year’s U.S. elections, thanks to last week’s injunction against the government talking to social media companies about taking down falsehood-packed posts. As the Washington Post reports, the Justice Department is trying to get a stay of the injunction, to allow “working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”
ElonJet hits Threads. The banned-on-Twitter ElonJet account, which followed Elon Musk’s personal jet using public data, is now available on Instagram’s Threads. As The Verge notes, account creator Jack Sweeney’s “decision to resurrect his real-time Elon jet tracker on Threads could further inflame tensions between the two social media giants.” Meanwhile, lots of far-right figures are also trying to get a foothold in Threads.
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
100 million
—The number of Threads sign-ups Mark Zuckerberg announced today, meaning Meta’s ersatz Twitter has reached the milestone even faster (five days versus two months) than ChatGPT did.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Elon Musk urges Twitter users to stick around for the laughs and occasional ‘negative stuff’ as Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads races to record sign-ups, by Orianna Rosa Royle
Meta and OpenAI face lawsuits from comedian Sarah Silverman and authors after their content was allegedly used to train A.I. models, by Eleanor Pringle
Tech execs should face ‘20 years in jail’ for letting A.I. bots sneakily pass as humans, says ‘Sapiens’ author, by Steve Mollman
Wharton professor says ‘things that took me weeks to master in my Ph.D.’ take ‘seconds’ with new ChatGPT tool, by Stephen Pastis
Scientists just used A.I. to map a fruit fly’s brain. Here’s why it’s a ‘turning point in neuroscience,’ by Rachel Shin
No, A.I. robot did not side-eye a question about killing people: ‘It’s easy to imagine that it functions like a human. It does not,’ by Chloe Taylor
BEFORE YOU GO
A supersonic reprise. NASA’s experimental X-59 aircraft is about to embark on extensive flight safety tests. The Lockheed Martin–built plane is supersonic like the Concorde that was retired two decades ago, but the big hope is that it won’t surprise the heck out of communities below by emitting sonic booms.
As The Register reports, NASA will be asking people in cities whether they hear the hopefully quiet jet passing overhead. If all goes well, the agency will give regulators data in 2027 that could lead to the reversal of a 1973 ban on nonmilitary supersonic flights over the U.S.
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