Digital Sovereignty in the EU: Navigating Schrems II, GDPR, and Local Hosting Mandates

Thu, 08 May 2025 14:50:00 +0000

On 16 July 2020 the Court of Justice of the European Union threw out the EU-US Privacy Shield, and an awful lot of European companies discovered overnight that the legal basis for storing their users’ data in an American cloud had evaporated. The case is known as Schrems II, after the Austrian lawyer Maximilian Schrems who spent the better part of a decade dragging Facebook’s data transfers through the courts. The ruling did not say “you may never send data to the US.” It said something more awkward: that you, the data exporter, are now personally on the hook for proving that the country you ship data to protects it to an EU standard — and that for the US specifically, given what the NSA was doing, that protection was inadequate.

Sovereignty - Tag - vo.rs

Digital Sovereignty in the EU: Navigating Schrems II, GDPR, and Local Hosting Mandates