As its data flows woes grow, Google lobbies for quickie fix to EU-US transfers

As the legal uncertainty in Europe clouding use of US cloud services cranks up, Google has responded by firing up its lobbying engines to call for US and European lawmakers to get a move on and come up a new rubberstamp to grease transatlantic data flows as usual as the bloc’s regulators finally start to find their banhammers.

Last week, Austria’s data protection authority decided that a local website’s use of Google Analytics to have breached the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) over the risk of US intelligence agencies being able to access site users’ personal data.

In a blog post calling for “a new EU-US data transfer framework”, Google’s Kent Walker flags this decision before seeking to downplay its significant — writing that Google has offered its eponymous analytics service to business for 15 years and “never once received the type of demand the DPA speculated about”, before adding: “We don’t expect to receive one because such a demand would be unlikely to fall within the narrow scope of the relevant law.”

It’s a reassuring-sounding soundbite by Google’s (and its parent Alphabet’s) chief lawyer and president of global affairs.

The problem is, legally speaking, it’s irrelevant — as it’s roughly the equivalent of Walker saying ‘waaa, EU law is not fair!’.