Panic in the cloud, as Europe kills Safe Harbor (@maxschrems cheers)

Europe has invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement. At a stroke, Facebook and more than 4,000 other companies can no longer legally move personal data from Europe to the USA.

It's causing panic in the Legal departments of companies that store European citizens' data. And it potentially opens the floodgates for a metric ton of privacy lawsuits across the member states of the European Union (EU).

In summary: the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the self-certified protections promised by Safe Harbor weren't worthy of Europe's ideal of privacy "as a human right." So they've kicked the whole caboodle back to the various information commissioners of the 28 member states.

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