Any Port in a Storm: The Safe Harbor, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the Problem of Privacy in Financial Services
![handle is hein.journals/gwilr36 and id is 677 raw text is: NOTE
ANY PORT IN A STORM: THE SAFE HARBOR, THE GRAMM-
LEACH-BLILEY ACT, AND THE PROBLEM OF
PRIVACY IN FINANCIAL SERVICES
Kyle Thomas Sammin*
I. INTRODUCTION
The European Union's Data Privacy Directive (Data Privacy
Directive) went into effect in 1998.1 It provided that companies
operating in the European Union, or dealing with the personal
data of E.U. citizens, must comply with certain regulations to pro-
tect the privacy of those customers. The first effect of this directive
was to standardize data privacy laws of the E.U.'s Member-States.
The second, more widespread, effect was to require non-E.U.
nations to prove to the European Union that their systems of data
privacy laws were sufficiently rigorous to protect the rights of E.U.
citizens who dealt with companies in those nations. To this end,
many other nations enacted or modified their own far-reaching,
bureaucratically enforced data privacy laws, and were determined
to be compliant.
Instead of completely rearranging its state and federal privacy
laws, the United States and the European Union devised a Safe
Harbor Agreement (Safe Harbor). The Safe Harbor, concluded
between the United States and the European Union in 2000, is a
method of allowing each side to continue to trade with the other
while compromising on issues of data privacy following the enact-
ment of the European Data Privacy Directive. The Safe Harbor,
however, did not resolve all trans-Atlantic privacy issues. As it cur-
rently exists, the Safe Harbor only applies to a part of the U.S. and
* J.D. Candidate, 2004, The George Washington University Law School.
1. Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Pro-
tection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and the Free Move-
ment of Such Data of 24 October 1995, 1995 O.J. (L 281) 31 [hereinafter Data Privacy
Directive].](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/gwilr36&div=34&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Any Port in a Storm: The Safe Harbor, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and the Problem of Privacy in Financial Services
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