Yes, I’m angry about the Schrems II decision!

Why the hell should a devote privacy and GDPR advocate be angry about this decision, after all it’s good for privacy is it not?

Yes decision is correct, but also no.

Clearly Facebook is a scapegoat, twice now with Schrems I and II. But now we are in limbo again! The fact is that even if the large businesses have heaps of money to bring in an army of legal professionals to replace all Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) with Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), which may or may not work. The Small Medium Business (SMB) do not have this luxury.

Apart from the large businesses, I work with quite a lot of SMBs, and I can tell you exactly how they feel in a single word…. confused in two words confused and hopeless. Most have yet to do their work for GDPR compliance, and those which have, may have done an initial effort in 2018, but have since done nothing.

What makes me angry is that now in 2020, some of these are calling me in because I have created some low-cost tools which help them to help themselves. They are making the effort, but they are in main, using cloud providers from the U.S., and there was a simple remediation, to check that the business was Privacy Shield certified. I had a cheat list of all most common cloud services, if the business wasn’t listed, my recommendation was to move to another which was. And so it was cheap and easy for them to fix themselves, without paying me my expensive hourly consulting rate.

So now all these SMBs have nothing, again. And yes I’m angry, because I was starting to get some traction in the SMB market. My speciality is making this legal stuff doable for any businesses, it’s not rocket science, But now it’s quite ridiculous, there is no way I will instruct every SMB to stop using all U.S. cloud services, they will kick me out. In fact the low-cost GDPR tools I have created are based on U.S. services, and they can’t be moved. There is nothing equivalent in the EU. It feels unfair to the SMB, they are getting the GDPR thing, and how it is good for business. Together, my small business and my customers were starting to make great progress.

It is not only my opinion that the SMB is critical for a functioning society, although maybe it is just mine that it is the SMB which will suffer most from this judgement?

Okay, sorry for this rant. I’m feeling a bit like Ms Angry, but now I’m done 😉

Image taken from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05g2zz1.

4 Replies to “Yes, I’m angry about the Schrems II decision!”

  1. Small and medium businesses always bear a disproportionate cost compared to major corporations and their deeper pockets. We are entering an interesting phase with this decision.

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