Americans have long been ignoring European data protection law, but it has not been ignoring us. Last year’s so-called “right to be forgotten” case from the EU’s highest court let people remove links about themselves from Google’s search results — and regulators insist that the links must disappear from U.S. search results, too. A ruling last week from the same high court closes off one of the main legal channels for European data to flow to the U.S. Now a new EU-wide regulation is nearly final, and it will set the rules for these and other data protection questions for years to come. It’s time to pay attention.
The new law is the General Data Protection Regulation. It does a lot of good things for Internet users — giving us the right to extract our data from one service to migrate to a competing one, for example. And it does a lot of things that — like the “right to be forgotten” — seem odd to Americans but align with the general European perspective on privacy and government regulation.
Read the full piece at Re/Code.