LONDON: Companies could face action from European privacy regulators if the European Commission and United States do not come up with a new system enabling them to shuffle data across the Atlantic in three months, the regulators said on Friday.

The highest EU court last week struck down a system known as Safe Harbour used by over 4,000 firms to transfer personal data to the US, leaving firms without alternatives scrambling to put new legal measures in place to ensure everyday business could continue.

Under EU data protection law, companies cannot transfer EU citizens’ personal data to countries outside the EU deemed to have insufficient privacy safeguards, of which the US is one.

EU data protection authorities meeting in Brussels to assess the implications of the ruling, said they would assess the impact of the judgement on other data transfer systems.