The Court of Justice of the European Union is hearing a key case that could change the system for data collection by U.S. corporations following a lawsuit from Austrian activist Max Schrems.

The U.S. mass surveillance network set up through PRISM is a direct violation of the European Union's agreement with the United States on safe transit of information for European citizens. The court case will discuss the US-EU Safe Harbor Network and how it can be formatted for an age of surveillance.

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Allegations against Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple claim they helped the U.S. government secure information on European citizens without disclosing it with any of the affected countries. The warrantless collection of millions of European's information was first disclosed by Edward Snowden in leaked NSA documents released by The Guardian in 2013.

Even though Microsoft and Yahoo have gone to extreme lengths to prevent the U.S. government gaining backdoor access to servers, including fighting the NSA in private court cases, they could still be found guilty of not protecting European's information.

The result of this trial might mean an end to U.S. companies storing European information on U.S. servers. These firms will instead build or rent local servers. This way, the U.S. government will either need to covertly attack the servers -- which could result in economic sanctions against the U.S. -- or obtain a warrant from the country in which the servers are located.

It's a bit iffy whether anything will be done, however, since the UK -- one of the prominent members of the EU -- has been working with the NSA on surveillance from the beginning. The GCHQ has even been accused of more radical surveillance on UK citizens, including collection and sorting of information from multiple websites and devices.

TagsEuropean Union, NSA, PRISM