German economy in a cloud dilemma

Brussels, Dusseldorf, Berlin After the standard fine against Meta for breaching data protection, the risk of high fines for German companies also increases. Data protection advocates described the decision to Handelsblatt as a precedent that could be applied to all companies that process data on servers in the US, for example with the ever-increasing use of cloud services.

Marit Hansen, Schleswig-Holstein’s data protection officer, said if companies “similarly make unacceptable transfers of personal data, they should urgently stop this and change their processing”. Otherwise, fines can be imposed as with Meta. “Should a supervisory authority identify a similar situation, the consequences would also be comparable.”

The risk is acute: “In hundreds of cases, data protection authorities are investigating data transfers to the US,” said Hamburg’s data protection officer, Ulrich Kuhn.