Facebook’s parent company had forwarded user data to the United States, without ensuring their privacy was guaranteed there. Mita has commanded to put an end to it.

Meta and affiliates such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp have already received hundreds of millions of euros in European fines for privacy violations. The European supervisors, united in the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), say the penalty has never been this high.

Privacy watchers fear that the US government will gain access to Europeans’ data. This information can then be transferred to the United States, where intelligence services are bound by less stringent privacy rules than European ones.

Push and pull around user data transfer

Internet companies in the European Union, the United States and the United States have been arguing about the transfer of European user data for some time. In 2020, the European Court annulled the agreements concluded in this regard. According to the EDPB, the typical contracts Meta has with the EU to be able to transfer data do not adequately protect users. This should be corrected before October.

Since Meta’s European headquarters are in Ireland, the Irish regulator levies the fine. At the start of this year, Meta was already fined €390 million by Irish privacy regulator the Data Privacy Commissioner (DPC). The company received that penalty for the way user data is used for personalized advertising.

This was not the first fine. For example, in September the DPC imposed a fine of 405 million euros on Instagram subsidiary Meta and in November there was already a fine of 265 million euros on Meta.