来源：《基督科学箴言报》
原文刊登日期：2023年7月11日
Each year, Europe and the United States conduct business worth $7.1 trillion across the Atlantic, much of it in digital information. But that bounty has always come with a risk to the privacy of consumers – something that has eluded the two sides for decades. They may now have a solution. Yesterday they completed a deal that means tech giants like Meta and Google can continue to store the private data of European consumers on computer servers in the U.S. For that to be possible, the agreement had to overcome legal and cultural differences about a cornerstone of democracy: trust.
每年，欧洲和美国在大西洋两岸开展的商业活动价值7.1万亿美元，其中大部分涉及数字信息。但这种丰厚的回报总是伴随着消费者隐私的风险——这是双方几十年来一直未达成一致的问题。它们现在可能有了解决办法。昨天，美欧完成了一项协议，这意味着Meta和谷歌等科技巨头可以继续将欧洲消费者的私人数据存储在美国的计算机服务器上。为了实现这一点，该协议必须克服关于民主基石的法律和文化差异：信任。
“I have worked tirelessly with my US counterparts to ... ensure that technological advances do not come at the cost of Europeans’ trust,” said Didier Reynders, the European Union’s commissioner for justice. “But as close like-minded-partners, the EU and the US could find solutions, based on their shared values, that are both lawful and workable in their respective systems.”
“我与美国同行不懈努力……确保技术进步不会以牺牲欧洲人的信任为代价，”欧盟司法专员迪迪埃·雷恩德斯说。“但作为志同道合的亲密伙伴，欧盟和美国可以基于共同的价值观找到在各自体系中既合法又可行的解决方案。”
The agreement, known as the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, grows out of two previous agreements that were overturned by Europe’s highest court. In 2015, for example, the court overturned a so-called safe harbor agreement because it failed to protect the online information of European consumers from U.S. government access.
该协议被称为“欧盟-美国数据隐私框架”，源于之前被欧洲最高法院推翻的两项协议。例如，2015年，欧洲最高法院推翻了一项所谓的安全港协议，因为该协议未能保护欧洲消费者的网上信息不被美国政府获取。
The new deal incorporates provisions from an executive order President Joe Biden issued last fall that gives individual European citizens a right to initiate an official inquiry if they suspect their data has been improperly collected by U.S. intelligence agencies. It also sets up an independent review board to hear such appeals.
新协议纳入了美国总统拜登去年秋天发布的一项行政命令中的条款，该命令规定，如果欧洲公民个人怀疑自己的数据被美国情报机构不当收集，他们有权发起官方调查。它还设立了一个独立的审查委员会来审理此类上诉。
In Europe, privacy is “an absolute fundamental right” enumerated under law. In the U.S., the right to privacy has been established differently – by regulations, executive orders, and court decisions. That status makes Americans as nervous as it does Europeans. A poll conducted by the International Association of Privacy Professionals last year, for example, found that 56% of Americans support legislation establishing privacy as a federal right – including a proposal to prevent social media companies from using personal data without consumers’ permission.
在欧洲，隐私是法律列举的“一项绝对的基本权利”。在美国，隐私权的确立方式不同——通过法规、行政命令和法院判决。这种状况让美国人和欧洲人一样紧张。例如，国际隐私专业人士协会去年进行的一项民意调查发现，56%的美国人支持立法，将隐私确立为一项联邦权利——包括一项防止社交媒体公司在未经消费者许可的情况下使用个人数据的提议。
Privacy, says Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the 2021 book “Why Privacy Matters,” is an anchor for values that move societies beyond fear and uncertainty. “Privacy matters because it lets us authentically develop our identities as humans, it safeguards our political freedom and autonomy as citizens, and it lets us participate in and trust the digital economy as consumers,” he said last year in a interview.
尼尔·理查兹是圣路易斯华盛顿大学的法学教授，2021年出版的《为什么隐私很重要》一书的作者。他说，隐私是推动社会超越恐惧和不确定性的价值观的支柱。“隐私很重要，因为它让我们真正地发展我们作为人类的身份，它保障我们作为公民的政治自由和自主权，它让我们作为消费者参与和信任数字经济，”他在去年接受采访时说。
Although the new framework includes an annual review mechanism to evaluate whether it is properly balancing and safeguarding the privacy concerns of individual Europeans, it is likely also to face legal challenges from the same advocacy groups that successfully challenged previous iterations. Its immediate impact, beyond lifting economic uncertainty, is to affirm the value of individual agency and identity in the control of personal data.
尽管新框架包括一个年度审查机制，以评估其是否正确平衡和保护了欧洲人个人的隐私问题，但它也可能面临来自那些成功挑战了前几次立法的游说团体的法律挑战。它的直接影响，除了消除经济不确定性之外，是确认个体主导和个人身份在控制个人数据方面的价值。