Handling foreign data in a post-safe harbor world.

• Position: PRIVACY - Brief article

When the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement, it didn't mention a grace period to allow governments or companies to transfer from a world with data handling guidelines to one without.

In a recent webcast, "No Safe Harbor: Five Strategies for Cross-Border eDiscovery," four e-discovery experts from Recommind suggested how firms can protect themselves from violating EU privacy laws in the new environment:

1. Limit collection. Ways to do this include leveraging mobile early case assessment and collections technology, indexing files on-location in the country for a text-based search of the data, and filtering aggressively via metadata, the experts said.

2. Process and host locally. Take advantage of multinational data centers to meet standards.

3. Segment data. Use this three-step process: 1) Apply analytics, specifically using software to auto-segment the data. 2) Have an EU team review it to confirm proper segmentation and that private data is not being moved. 3) Share the confirmed safe data across the border with a U.S. team to conduct review.

4. Restrict access. When U.S...