Safe Harbor Becomes Privacy Shield, and We’re on Board

As you may or may not know, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down the EU Safe Harbor framework back in October 2015. The Safe Harbor agreement was originally reached in 2000, and provided a framework to allow US-based companies to transfer EU citizens’ data to the USA if the company met EU standards for privacy protection.

Since 2010, DiscountASP.NET has maintained US-EU Safe Harbor certification, working with our privacy management solutions partner, TRUSTe. We chose to invest in attaining Safe Harbor status because we host customers from all over the world and we wanted to make sure that our EU customers are confident that we are following EU privacy standards. We believe it’s a differentiator and shows our commitment to protecting your privacy.

Naturally, we were very concerned when the Safe Harbor framework was ruled invalid. After the ruling came out we reached out to TRUSTe to get guidance, and they informed us that US and EU teams were negotiating a new privacy framework. It took a while, but in July 2016, the new framework was approved with a new name, Privacy Shield. On August 1, 2016, the U.S. Department of Commerce started accepting certifications under the new Privacy Shield framework.

We are currently working on (hopefully) the final stages of the Privacy Shield certification process. To this end, we will be updating our Privacy Policy soon to meet the new standards.

We hope that our efforts here demonstrate our commitment to privacy protection.