Max Schrems

Chairman and founder of noyb, a "privacy enforcement platform" that brings data protection cases to the courts under the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Schrems first came to notoriety as an Austrian law student, who filed a complaint to the Irish Data Commissioner that Facebook Ireland was illegally sharing his personal data with the U.S. government, following the revelations of Edward Snowden. The case, known as "The Schrems case" or "Schrems I," eventually led to the invalidation of the Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement between the EU and U.S. (see "Safe Harbor" and "Privacy Shield"). Schrems later amended his complaint against Facebook Ireland with the Irish Data Protection Commission after Facebook switched its transfer mechanism from Safe Harbor to standard contractual clauses, leading to a new referral to the CJEU implicating both standard contractual clauses and the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. On July 16, 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated Privacy Shield, and placed additional requirements for companies using standard contractual clauses to third countries outside the EU.