Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. & Maximillian Schrems (Schrems II)

The Ruling

The Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework, holding that U.S. surveillance laws (notably FISA § 702 and Executive Order 12333) do not satisfy the EU's requirement of essentially equivalent protection for personal data of EU subjects, and that EU residents lack actionable judicial redress against U.S. intelligence collection. Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) remain valid in principle but require case-by-case assessment of the destination country's legal regime.

The Personhood Argument Not Made

Schrems II is the strongest existing assertion that personhood travels with the data — and across borders. Where U.S. doctrine treats the user's information once shared as belonging to the platform fief, EU law treats personal data as an extension of the data subject's fundamental rights under the Charter. The decision functions as a sovereign challenge to techno-feudal extraction: the platform may host the serf's data only on terms that preserve the serf's personhood vis-à-vis any state that may later access it. It is the clearest counter-precedent in this collection.

The Execution Gap Created

More than 5,000 U.S. companies relied on the Privacy Shield prior to its invalidation (U.S. Department of Commerce Privacy Shield list, July 2020). In the years following Schrems II, EU data-protection authorities issued enforcement actions against major platforms — including the Irish Data Protection Commission's €1.2 billion fine against Meta in May 2023 for continued EU-U.S. data transfers under inadequate safeguards. The right exists in EU law and is being enforced; the underlying flows largely continue under successor frameworks (the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, 2023) that face renewed legal challenge.

Primary sources & research

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Related cases

• Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
• Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
• McCleskey v. Kemp (1987)
• Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022)

Part of The Personhood Prism, the companion to The Execution Gap by Thomas William Hornig. See all personhood cases →