What is Schrems II?
Schrems II is the July 2020 Court of Justice of the European Union judgment that invalidated the EU–US Privacy Shield framework and required case-by-case assessment of other transfer mechanisms. It triggered a wave of national decisions finding conventional analytics unlawful, because those tools sent EU visitors' personal data to US servers.
Explanatory, not legal advice. Transfer law is unusually fast-moving; check the current position before relying on any summary.
What the ruling did
It invalidated Privacy Shield, the framework thousands of companies relied on to move personal data from the EU to the US, on the grounds that US surveillance law did not offer protection equivalent to EU standards. It left Standard Contractual Clauses valid, but only with a case-by-case assessment of whether the destination country’s law actually permits the protections the clauses promise.
Between 2020 and 2023, data protection authorities in Austria, France, Italy, Denmark and elsewhere issued decisions finding specific implementations of a major US analytics product unlawful for precisely this reason.
The current position
The EU–US Data Privacy Framework, adopted in July 2023, restored a transfer mechanism for certified US organisations. It is being challenged, and its two predecessors — Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield — were both struck down after similar challenges.
The reasonable planning assumption is therefore not that transfers are permanently settled, but that this area has a history of changing under organisations that built on it.
Why “no personal data” is the durable answer
Transfer rules apply to personal data. Analytics that never collects any has nothing whose transfer is regulated, and its legal position does not change when the next framework is challenged.
That is a stronger position than data residency alone. Keeping personal data in the EU narrows the problem to the case where it moves; collecting none removes the category. Both are legitimate approaches, and it is worth knowing which one a vendor is actually offering you.