Cameron Kerry & Shane Tews
When the first Trump administration took office in 2017, it kept in place the Privacy Shield framework, which enabled transfers of personal data from the EU to the U.S. At that time, the framework allowed continued transatlantic data flows without violating the EU’s data protection law, sustaining one of the world’s largest trading relationships.
The second Trump administration should exercise the same wisdom as to the successor of the Privacy Shield, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
In both 2016 and 2024, the President-elect Trump campaigned on promises to roll back his predecessors’ executive orders. Fortunately, the Privacy Shield was not included in these rollbacks. In remarks on his first day as Trump’s secretary of commerce in 2017, Wilbur Ross affirmed the importance of protecting the framework and the Trump administration left undisturbed the foundation of the Privacy Shield—President Barack Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28). This executive order required intelligence agencies to extend to people outside the United States the privacy and civil liberties protections that intelligence laws and procedures accord to “U.S. persons,” i.e., U.S. citizens and noncitizens within the U.S. PPD-28 also designated a State Department undersecretary as an ombudsperson to review inquiries by individuals in the EU about surveillance that might affect them.
The economic calculus was simple: The cost of the Privacy Shield was low for the U.S., and undoing it would have handed the EU a trade barrier against U.S. businesses seeking to compete in European markets and reduced U.S. exports.
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