The Riverside Press-Enterprise
EU fines Meta $1.3B over data sent to U.S.
Company calls decision condemning its security ‘flawed,’ vows to appeal
Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. was hit by a record $1.3 billion European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users’ data to the U.S. af- ter regulators said it failed to protect per- sonal information from the American se- curity services.
The social network giant’s continued data transfers to the U.S. didn’t address “the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of people whose data was being transferred across the Atlantic, the Irish Data Protection Commission said on Monday.
On top of the fine, which eclipses a $806 million EU privacy penalty previously doled out to Amazon.com, Meta was given five months to “suspend any future transfer of personal data to the U.S.” and six months to stop “the unlawful processing, including storage, in the U.S.” of transferred personal EU data.
The ban on data transfers was widely expected and once prompted the U.S. firm to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU. Still, the likely impact has now been muted by the transition phase and the prospect of a new EU-U.S. data flows agreement that could already be operational by the middle of this year.
Monday’s decision is the latest round in a long-running saga that eventually saw Facebook and thousands of other companies plunged into a legal vacuum. In 2020, the EU’S top court annulled an EU-U.S. pact regulating transatlantic data flows over fears citizens’ data wasn’t safe once it arrived on U.S. servers.
While judges didn’t strike down an alternative tool based on contractual clauses, their doubts about American data protection quickly led to a preliminary order from the Irish authority telling Facebook it could no longer move data to the U.S. 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 data-transfer curbs risk 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,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and Jennifer Newstead, chief legal officer, said in a blog post.
EU regulators in December unveiled proposals to replace the previous “Privacy Shield” pact that had been torpedoed by the EU’S Court of Justice. This followed months of negotiations with the U.S., which yielded an executive order by President Joe Biden and U.S. pledges to ensure that EU citizens’ data is safe once it’s shipped across the Atlantic.