SaaS Agreements – FAQs – EU Standard Contractual Clauses

When entering into a SaaS agreement with a SaaS customer a SaaS supplier will often need to transfer customer data that contains EU personal data outside of the EEA. This could be at the request of a SaaS customer or more usually because the SaaS supplier uses a sub-contractor located outside of the EEA to provide part of the services on its behalf (as a sub-processor). For example: a data centre, online customer support centre or email service provider provided by a company located in the USA.
SaaS suppliers and SaaS customers must use EU standard contractual clauses in order to comply with their duties under the GDPR when making such restricted transfers of EU personal data.

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SaaS Agreements – New UK SCCs – IDTA and UK Addendum

Since the EU-US Privacy Shield was declared invalid following the Schrems II decision in 2020 of the ECJ, SaaS suppliers and SaaS customers have had to use EU standard contractual clauses, (“EU SCCs”) or binding corporate rules (“BCRs”) when transferring personal data from the EEA, UK or Switzerland to a third country not deemed “adequate” by the European Commission.

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SaaS Agreements – Data Protection – New EU-US Privacy Shield?

Following the Schrems II judgement of the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”), which invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield which resulted in the subsequent European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”) final data transfer guidance, SaaS customers and SaaS suppliers are currently required to carry out a data transfer assessment (“DTA”) prior to transferring personal data outside of the EEA to a “third country” i.e. to a country which does not have an “adequacy decision” from the EU, for example, the USA.

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SaaS Agreements – FAQs – Cookies

Cookies are small text files placed on a user’s hardware device, such as a computer, tablet or mobile phone which record online activity. The majority of websites use cookies to measure visits and the use of websites (analytics cookies). Cookies are often also used to save user names, passwords and user preferences to make repeated use of a website more comfortable for the user. However, increasingly cookies are being used to collect information about users for the purposes of targeted marketing, tracking and other non essential purposes.

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