EU Member States (the Article 31 Committee)  approved today the EU-US Privacy Shield.  The next step is formal adoption.  The full press release can be found here.

The approval of the Privacy Shield is good news for companies who transfer personal data from the EU to the US. Although legal challenges to the Privacy Shield are likely, the Privacy Shield was designed to address the shortcomings cited by the European Court of Justice in the now invalidated Safe Harbor self-certification scheme and should have a better chance of standing up to those legal challenges.