Can I ask what are the day-to-day implications for Europe on this? I kinda get it for the US but I believe Europeans will be hampered as well, or am I reading this the wrong way?

Details haven't come in yet, but this could be a huge problem for anyone who transfers data across international boundaries. depending on how it's legislated.

This was a logical outcome..which is why I moved all sites that are aimed at an EU audience into EU hosting two or three years ago..

Will mean that many EU webmasters ( if they want to be in compliance with EU data laws will need to move to EU hosting / and look very carefully at what 3rd parties are collecting from their sites about their users ) ..Such things as "social media" and other "tracking" buttons and scripts ( Ganalytics, adsense cookie analysis ) etc are sending data to the U.S.A, which in the light of this ruling is no longer acceptable..

EU hosting companies will maybe see a major boost in clients..But EU webmasters will need to look very closely at who genuinely does host your website in the EU..and who claims that they do, but in fact frequently hosts customers who sign up for "hosted in the EU", in their U.S.A DC spaces.

@Nutterum, for one thing, it means European companies cannot outsource processing or storage or personal data to the US.

@leosghost, are you sure about social media and tracking buttons? I would have thought there is no transfer from you, because you do not capture the data - they capture it directly. Furthermore, the data cannot always be linked to a person, and you do not even know whether it can or not.

I agree it was inevitable.

Incidentally, I think it is, in any case, good practice not to use social media buttons provided by the social media sites. Simple share links do the job equally well, load faster, and mean you are not handing over data in usage of your site to someone else for no return (they end up with better data than you, because they can identify logged in users), and you protect your users privacy.

Another issue: ownership of the hosting provider. Even if your site is hosted on a server in the EU, if it is provided by an American company, what will they do if the American authorities demand access to the data? It will probably be the same as in the Indymedia case: [privacyinternational.org ]. I doubt you will have a legal liability, but its probably a situation best avoided,

I understand the situation now, but that does make this ruling any less of a mess. The big data providers are so interlinked that essentially this ruling will be ignored largely because of its ineffectiveness. The only benefit might be that companies can sue their hosting/data providers if they provide information to US authorities without their consent, which is still a moot point because they will regardless, just this time won't tell anyone.

The Internet doesn't really work within geographical borders. This could have strange effects on where data is hosted. How do you deal with cloud services and CDNs? How can they enforce this?

They can`t. This ruling in my mind is made for a "what if" legal situation, where a company can sue another company for providing data to US Agencies without the consent of the first company. Basically Europe is tightening their pants against a potential second Snowden case. If such case presents itself many companies can sue US for damages or whatever else they deem worthy.