EU, U.S. agree on new data transfer deal.

• Position: PRIVACY - Brief article

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After three months of intermittent talks, U.S. and European officials have reached a new agreement on how digital data will be transferred from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The Privacy Shield agreement, which still requires political approval, means European data protection authorities will not restrict data transfers as they had planned to if an agreement had not been reached.

According to Reuters, the European Commission said Privacy Shield will place stronger obligations on U.S. companies to protect Europeans' personal data and ensure stronger monitoring and enforcement by U.S. agencies than the previous Safe Harbor agreement.

Since Safe Harbor was invalidated by the European Court of Justice in October 2015, about 4,000 U.S. companies that had relied on it to collect and transfer data out of the EU have been without any legal guidelines for handling information ranging from financial information to social media posts.

"We have for the first time received detailed written assurances from the United States on...