As of March 2019, the United Kingdom will have the status of a “third country” from the perspective of the European Union and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Will the EU accept that UK data protection standards are high enough to grant them the status of “adequacy,” which will allow data to flow more easily between the UK and the EU? Or will a “data wall” appear overnight between the UK and the EU? The answers to these questions obviously matter to the UK. These data-related issues arise at a crucial moment in the development of the EU economy, which will be badly hurt by a post-Brexit data wall. The UK finance and tech sectors are at special risk, since they require a firehose of cross-border data transfers.
