A year ago, Techdirt wrote about the melodramatically-named „Privacy Shield.“ Under EU data protection laws, the transfer of EU citizens‘ personal data is only legal if the destination country meets certain basic conditions for data protection. Signing up to Privacy Shield is designed to allow US companies to meet that requirement. The earlier framework, called „Safe Harbor,“ was thrown out by the EU‘s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), largely because of NSA spying on data flows. Privacy Shield was hurriedly cobbled together because, without it, the vast flows of data across the Atlantic that occur all the time would be much harder to square with EU laws.