Why were the Safe Harbor principles created in the first place? To maintain trade between Europe and the United States, with Europe fully aware of the lax attempts at data privacy performed on the part of the U.S.’s biggest companies.
Why Europe needed Safe Harbor principles
The vast majority of people using services on the web — be it web-based email like Hotmail or Yahoo!, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, or anything as minute as a website requiring registration– tend not to think about where their personal data like photos and email is stored.
On the whole, these services are designed to save us time and energy, and we have come to want the offerings of these services on-demand, without thinking too much about privacy. We expect our respective governments, wherever we are in the world, to protect us to a level where we can act and communicate freely.
However, an inequality in legal protection between the United States and the European Union could have massive consequences for users of ‘the cloud’.
Data protection legislation differs greatly between the European Union and the United States. With a vast number of organisations branching out to worldwide offices during the dot-com boom, it was clear to legislators that data transfer and protection laws needed a global overhaul. A particular area of focus for data legislation was the European Union, with dozens of countries sharing elements of the same law.
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