On June 16th 2020 the Court of Justice of the Europen Union invalidated the “Privacy Shield”. The EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield are Frameworks designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission and Swiss Administration to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union and Switzerland to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce.

The inability of the US government to regulate how private companies and corporations transfer and process data of the EU citizens lead the CJEU to rule against the Privacy Shield. The enforcement of the Privacy Shield a few years back brought a new era on how US-based companies deal with such information by imposing more strict rules on the handle of the data but according to the court decision, private information of EU citizens keep being violated.

The CJEU’s decision was clear that US surveillance laws do not comply with GDPR. Although there are regulations that might protect to a degree US citizens’ rights against the NSA, there is no such thing for foreign citizens. This violates one of the primary rights of every European citizen.

Why is this related to Email Marketing?

As a marketer, you receive every day data from and for your subscribers. These data are either their initial personal information they insert when subscribing to your newsletter but can also be the data you receive from their interaction with your campaigns. As an owner of a phpList installation, you are the sole owner of these data. Most EU based phpList users chose an EU server location to host their phpList because they feel that regulations across the European Union are in favour of their privacy. We welcome the decision from the ECJ because with this decision Open Source Software gains more and more ground towards the fight against proprietary software.