OPINION: Looming no-deal Brexit raises questions about cross-border data transfers - Business Insider

But in the modern economy, every business is in the data business.Right now, the European Commission is trying to figure out if Britain's policies for personal data management will be strong enough to ensure adequacy with GDPR.If they're satisfied, then those vital data flows can continue even after the UK leaves the European Union on January 1, 2021.But if the European Commission doesn't find adequacy between new British data standards and GDPR, they can shut down the transfer of EU data to the newly isolated island. This is about deeper political economy questions of who has a right to what — about Europeans being able to hold non-native companies to certain standards if they want to profit off European user data.It boils down to: "If you want access to our markets, you play by our data rules." Cummings, Boris Johnson, and other Tory luminaries may be about to find this out the hard way.From the summer's Privacy Shield ruling to the present Brexit jockeying to the US's continued escalation of data gamesmanship against China, 2020 is emerging as the year that data nationalism jumped rails from China and Russia to impact the world at large.Businesses everywhere could be forgiven for wondering if vital data flows will be staunched tomorrow by a new round of political upheaval.But there's really not much they can do to prevent the first-order impacts.Facebook will throw its full legal might behind a challenge to the Irish DPC's data shutdown order.