A Safe Harbor isn’t so safe if a company misrepresents itself as being certified as such, according to Luis Diaz and Wendy Stein of Gibbons. They’re referring to a framework that was implemented by the U.S. government and the European Union to reconcile the differences between data privacy laws in Europe and the U.S. and allow compliant data transfers across the two jurisdictions. The lawyers say the Federal Trade Commission has been ramping up its enforcement against companies that have been falsely displaying the Safe Harbor Framework Certification Mark on their sites.
“Companies looking to self-certify in the future and those that have self-certified more than one year ago and failed to re-certify should take note of this important trend,” warn Diaz and Stein. The certification is entirely voluntary, but once undertaken the U.S.-based company has to transfer personal information from EU member states in a fashion that complies with European law.
