Since the former Safe Harbour-deal was ruled illegal by the EU court there have been negotiations between the EU and the US to get a new deal to secure the transatlantic data flow.
Without this deal cloud services like Office 365 and Facebook - and many more - would be useless.
The new deal is called the EU-US Privacy Shield clearly indicating that the somewhat privacy offending tradition of the Safe Harbour deal should not continue.
The point is to make clear to companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Apple that deal with personal private data; what is expected of them and how they must treat them.
It is no secret that the US companies treating european personal data will have to meet stricter requirements than before.
So this is new:
The U.S. has ruled out indiscriminate mass surveillance on the personal data transferred to the US under the new arrangement.
It will be controlled:
The European Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce will conduct the review and invite national intelligence experts from the U.S. and European Data Protection Authorities to it.
The US FTC will be authorized to control and follow up the US end of of the deal. Of course targeted surveillance operations are still allowed but they must be specific and targeted - that is new too.
It appears that there will be exceptions to this rule - given the nature of the threat - so it remains to be seen how widely these exceptions will be implemented.
And it is not as clear as it looks:
The US commitments not to indulge in mass surveillance need to be clarified, since in the NSA's dictionary it's not surveillance if they collect masses of information online and store it, but only if an analyst actually looks at it.
It is yet unclear how the US corporations will implement this on a daily level.
The Internal US "We only spy on foreigners" defence seems somewhat weakened (at least for foreigners living in the EU).
President Obama has failed to provide any comfort to the 96 per cent of the world who are not American citizens and do not get Fourth Amendment protections against NSA’s vast reach
EU press release here and US publication here