– European Court of Justice declares transatlantic data protection agreement invalid.
– TeamDrive supports companies that want to switch from US providers to a German cloud.
– Managing Director Detlef Schmuck: “Anyone who continues to store company data with a US provider may be accused of gross negligence.

Hamburg, July 16, 2020 – The Hamburg-based cloud services provider TeamDrive GmbH has launched a new migration program for companies affected by the fact that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has declared the transatlantic EU-US Privacy Shield Agreement invalid. European companies using US cloud providers to store personal data are exposed to the risk of violating EU data protection regulations as a result of the ruling. “German companies would be well advised to withdraw their data stocks from US services as quickly as possible and redirect them to German providers,” says TeamDrive Managing Director Detlef Schmuck, not entirely unselfishly. After all, his company has already set up migration support for companies that want to withdraw their data from the USA and relocate it to Germany. This means that every company that switches to TeamDrive receives extensive remote support during the data migration; the first hour of support is even free of charge.

“We were expecting the verdict and therefore called our support colleagues back from vacation,” says Detlef Schmuck. He points out that the judges of the European Court of Justice explicitly point out in their reasons for the ruling that the data protection authorities are obliged to suspend or prohibit data transfers if it is suspected that data protection is not being observed in the USA. “In fact, the judges thus declare the standard contractual clauses with which many US providers sought to conceal the foreseeable tilting of the privacy shield to be unsafe, even though they were not found to be invalid in principle. In any case, this has nothing to do with legal certainty,” says Detlef Schmuck.
“Anyone who, as the person responsible in a company, allows personal company data to continue to be stored by a US provider in view of this uncertain legal situation may be accused of grossly negligent conduct”, says Detlef Schmuck, and formulates somewhat exaggeratedly: “The ECJ ruling basically puts the USA on par with, say, China, North Korea and Namibia in terms of data protection”.