EU fines Meta over user data sent to US
DUBLIN: Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has been hit by a record ¤1.2 billion ($2.1 billion) European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users’ data to the United States after regulators said it failed to protect personal information from US security services.
The social network giant’s continued data transfers to the US had not addressed ‘‘the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms’’ of people whose data was being transferred across the Atlantic, the Irish Data Protection Commission said yesterday.
The Irish watchdog, which is the lead EU regulator for many of the world’s top technology companies because of the location of their European headquarters in Ireland, has said the suspension order could create a precedent for other firms.
On top of the fine — eclipsing a ¤746 million EU privacy penalty previously given to Amazon.com Inc — Meta was given five months to ‘‘suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US’’ and six months to stop ‘‘the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US’’ of transferred personal EU data.
The ban on data transfers was widely expected and once prompted Meta to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU.
Still, the likely impact has now been muted by the prospect of a new EUUS data flows agreement that could be made this year.
The EU decision is the latest in a longrunning saga that eventually saw Facebook and thousands of other companies plunged into a legal vacuum.
In 2020, the EU’s top court annulled an EUUS pact regulating transatlantic data flows over fears citizens’ data was not safe once sent to US servers.
While judges did not strike down an alternative tool based on contractual clauses, their doubts about US data protection quickly led to a preliminary order from the Irish authority telling Facebook it could no longer move data to the US via this other method either.
Meta said it would appeal the
Irish decision, describing it as ‘‘flawed’’ and ‘‘unjustified’’.
The company also promised to immediately seek a suspension of the banning orders, saying they would cause harm to ‘‘the millions of people who use Facebook every day’’.
The datatransfer curbs risked carving up the internet ‘‘into national and regional silos, restricting the global economy and leaving citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services we have
come to rely on’’, Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg and chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead said in a blog post.
EU regulators in December last year unveiled proposals to replace the previous pact that had been torpedoed by the EU’s Court of Justice.
This followed months of negotiations with the US. The battle over where Meta’s Facebook stores data began a decade ago after campaigners brought legal challenges over the risk of US snooping in light of disclosures by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. — TNS/Reuters
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