Under European law, service providers are legally obligated to maintain the levels of security and privacy for personal, non-public information. Because of these protections, data from European users cannot be moved to jurisdictions where the same level of protection does not exist.
Think of it as setting a minimum water level for security and privacy: you cannot take data from a place that offers higher levels of protection and move it to a place where lower levels exist.
This set a basic set of parameters for all users inside of the EU to ensure their privacy was met the same by every online company they dealt with, no matter if the company was in France, Germany, or Poland.
Of course, this left places like the US out in the cold; after all, our data privacy laws are nearly non-existent compared to those of the EU.
The saved copy of this article stops there. The rest is on LinkedIn.