From October 3, 2022, authorities in the United Kingdom and the United States will be able to exchange the personal data of their citizens. A joint agreement called the Cloud Act, which will officially allow the two nations to “combat serious crimes, including terrorism, child abuse and cybercrime”.
Entry into force of the Cloud Act on October 3, 2022
Since Brexit took effect, British citizens are no longer protected by European regulations. At the end of 2020, Meta and Google had, for example, decided to switch British users to American regulations. Internet users had to accept new terms and conditions on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. At the time, the UK branch of Meta said that, “Like other companies, Meta has had to make changes to respond to Brexit, including the transfer of UK user responsibilities and legal obligations from Facebook Ireland to Facebook Inc.”.
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As the US Department of Justice and the UK Home Office recalled in a joint press release, with the Cloud Act, the US and the UK signed a data access agreement that will allow law enforcement in each country to ask the other for user data. This agreement should enable the two countries to access “more quickly than ever before to information and evidence held by platforms within each of our nations, in connection with the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of serious crimes”. According to authorities in both countries, this will help law enforcement agencies more effectively access the evidence they need.
What about the relationship between the United States and the European Union?
Australia has also joined the Cloud Act alongside the UK and the US. First unveiled in 2017, the plan grew out of the fact that every country’s crime-fighting agencies were crippled by laws that made it difficult to obtain data overseas from web giants like Google and Facebook. The aim was to create a bilateral agreement to remove some of these barriers, while “maintaining strong privacy protections for citizens”, according to the UK Home Office. This new agreement will therefore be effective on October 3.
Between the European Union and the United States, a ” agreement in principle “ for Privacy Shield’s successor has presumably been found. In March 2022, during a visit by Joe Biden on the sidelines of the war in Ukraine, the leaders took advantage of this meeting to settle a deep dispute. The future Privacy Shield may have been found. This agreement, which authorized data transfers on both sides of the Atlantic, was broken in 2020 by the Court of Justice of the Union (CJEU) because it contravened the GDPR. The regulation prohibits the transfer of European personal data to a country with a lower level of data protection than the Old Continent.
