For the last 15 years, companies operating in the United States and Europe have benefited from Safe Harbor – a streamlined process that allowed U.S. companies to transfer and store European citizens’ data in the U.S. provided a level of privacy protections were adhered to according to outlined European standards. Recently, however, an Irish court has ruled, in a case brought by an Austrian citizen concerned about how Facebook was handling his private data, that the Safe Harbor agreement is inconsistent with European privacy law, as it did not require all organizations entitled to work with EU privacy-related data to comply with it. The court’s decision means Ireland’s Data Privacy Commissioner must review the merits of the case and make a final determination about whether Facebook is allowed to transfer private data from its European users to the United States. In the mean time, companies that had relied on the Safe Harbor process can no longer do so. In today’s data-centric business world, the ruling comes as a blow to thousands of companies operating at the global scale that are now faced with navigating new, complicated individual standards – across multiple regions.