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Questback has announced that it meets EU data transfer regulations. Questback, which has headquarters in Oslo, Norway, was established in 2000. It has subsidiaries in six countries and operates in 19 countries worldwide. Questback specializes in offering “web-based services for building relations through gathering, analysis and follow-up of business critical information”.
The company’s announcement was made as a response to the recent European Court of Justice ruling which invalidated the Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement between the United States and European Union/European Economic Area (EEA). With the ruling, companies processing data under the agreement no longer comply with EU/EEA regulations. This means people using the services of companies still operating under the Safe Harbor agreement might actually be breaking European data laws.
Questback confirmed all European personal data is processed at the company’s Bremen data center in Germany. The facility has been audited and certified by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). As a result, it meets EU/EEA requirements and the axing of the Safe Harbor agreement therefore has “no consequences for Questback customers”.
“Data protection is enshrined in Questback’s DNA,” explained Questback’s CTO, Oliver Trabert. “From the outset the company has taken privacy and data protection extremely seriously. We chose to invest in secure hosting of personal information in the EU, rather than in the US or other regions. The European Court of Justice ruling has serious consequences for those software companies, and their customers, that relied on the Safe Harbor framework to export personal data to the US. This is now judged to not provide an adequate level of protection for such information. We’d urge all organisations that use Software as a Service providers to check that they are equally compliant, and are consequently not breaking the law when it comes to data protection.”
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