By Siddharth Sonkar
Recently, in his inaugural address, US President Joe Biden announced the appointment of Christopher Hoff, to oversee the negotiations over revising the United States (US)-European Union (EU) privacy shield the privacy pact which governed the relationship between the US and the EU in relation to international data transfers until it was invalidated on 16 July, 2020 by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Data Protection Commission v. Facebook Ireland (Schrems II). The CJEU held that the protection afforded to data of EU persons in the US to be inadequate to an ‘essentially equivalent standard’ of protection as compared to that in the EU.
A move by three tech giants in the US to shutdown Parler - a social media platform favoured by Donald Trump supporters - has renewed debate over freedom of speech online.
In the wake of the US Capitol riots earlier this month, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, while Amazon Web Services stopped hosting the company on its servers.
All three argued Parler had not done enough to moderate content posted on its platform.
Associate Professor in UCD s Sutherland School of Law TJ McIntyre said of the Parler shutdown: This is the first time we ve seen this response to the platform.