The EU–US Privacy Shield was declared invalid on 16 July 2020. But many critics of the new EU-US data protection agreement say that it doesn’t adequately protect the data of European users and still makes it too easy for US authorities to gain insight into personal data. Generally, it’s advisable never to upload personal customer data to a cloud storage facility, although the EU-US Privacy Shield, the follow-up to the Safe Harbor Agreement between the EU and the United States came into effect in the summer of 2016, meaning more protection for data sent from Europe but stored and shared in the USA. Most file hosting servers are located partly or entirely in the USA, where data protection laws are notably more relaxed than in most countries in the EU.

The location of the computer on which these user files are stored determines the data protection regulations that are applicable for the files. The server location can also be important to know, particularly for businesses. And particularly sensitive data simply shouldn’t be uploaded to the computer cloud in the first place. For this reason, experts advise users to encrypt all files that have been uploaded to a cloud storage service. The problem with using online storage services is it can be difficult to know exactly who has access to your files besides you. It wasn’t just hackers who were able to gain access to a variety of accounts on these different storage providers: the NSA also broke into many Dropbox user accounts. Several cloud storage providers have received negative press in the past when it comes to data protection.

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