The European Union’s highest court has invalidated the Privacy Shield agreement that lets U.S. companies freely import data on European citizens. (Here’s the press release.) It’s a big deal but transfers are still allowed when the partners sign contracts that protect data from misuse. It’s almost as if the Europeans have decided the U.S. government can’t be trusted.

And speaking of privacy, Google Cloud plans a set of Confidential Computing services which will protect all kinds of data, not just customer identities. They just announced the beta version of the first product, Confidential VMs, which will use special hardware to encrypt data while it’s being processed. Traditionally, data had to be decrypted during processing, which gave bad guys a chance to steal it.

Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation.  The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.