THE SAFE HARBOR AGREEMENT

Data Protection Law - The Safe Harbor Agreement

Data Protection Law - The Safe Harbor Agreement

Introduction

On October, 1998, The European Union Directive on the Protection of Personal Data became effective. The Directive came up from European Union efforts to complement its Member's decrees in connection with the protection of personal data. Its purpose was to assist information flows inside the European Union and, thus, to support the European Union's in-house marketplace and to promote the expansion of the information-based nation, usually, and in particular the e-commerce and the Internet. (Marsha, 2002)

The Directive concerns to all institutes, community and personal, working in the European Union. It envelops the dealing out of the entire personal data, either completed automatically or manually. There is no exclusion for public records, for instance phone directory listings. Under the Directive data may be gathered and used merely for particular, precise and lawful purposes. Protection and accurateness ought to be assured. Persons have not only the right to access and the right to correct errors, but also to corrective actions and reimbursement, if essential. The transmission of data to outsiders may take place only underneath correspondingly severe necessities. More severe regulations pertain to the dispensation of sensitive data, together with data connecting to race; cultural basis; political, spiritual, or theoretical viewpoints; and physical condition.

Discussion

The European Commission's Directive on Data Protection would forbid the transmission of personal data to non European Union nations that do not convene the European "capability" standard for privacy protection. Whilst the US and the European Union share the objective of developing privacy protection for their general public, the US takes a dissimilar approach to privacy from that taken by the European Union. The US exploits sectored approaches that rely on a blend of legislation, directives, and self instructions. The European Union, nevertheless, rely on widespread legislation that, for instance, needs formation of administration data protection bureaus, registration of data bases with those bureaus, and in various cases preceding to agreement the processing of personal data could start. Consequently to diverse privacy approaches, the Directive might have considerably hindered the capability of United States corporations to employ in several trans-Atlantic dealings.

So as to overpass these diverse privacy approaches and give a sleek means for United States corporations to abide by the Directive, the United States division of trade in conference with the EU Commission incorporated a "safe harbor" skeleton. ...