India is ripe for a legal action that challenges mass surveillance of personal user data: not just that within the country, but also the collection of data of Indian citizens by US companies. A ruling today from the European Court of Justice has struck down the Safe Harbor mechanism (notes on how it worked below) which facilitates the transfer of personal data from the EU to servers hosted in the US, which essentially means that user data generated in the EU will have to be hosted in the EU, and be governed by EU laws for data protection. Quite simply, the court has said that the data held in US servers isn't secure enough for EU data, given that the NSA's ‘PRISM’ program gives the US government "unrestricted access to data stored on servers in the United States owned or controlled by a range of companies active in the internet and technology field, such as Facebook USA." The Lowdown on the judgment 1. How this began: The ruling comes following a complaint from Maximillian Schrems in 2013, in which he said that the law and practices of the United States offer no real protection of the data kept in the United States against State surveillance, following the revelations by Edward Snowden in May 2013. The complaint was filed with the Data Protection Authority in Ireland, since the terms for Facebook in the EU are applicable to Ireland. Facebook Ireland keeps its subscriber data in servers in the United States. MediaNama's take: Readers should note that the US…
