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Meta receives a record fine of US$ 1,300 million.  for violating data rules in Europe

Meta receives a record fine of US$ 1,300 million. for violating data rules in Europe

US social media giant Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros (nearly $1.3 billion) on Monday for breaching European data protection rules, the highest penalty imposed in Europe for such breaches.

Meta, which plans to appeal the decision, was sentenced for having “continued to transfer personal data” of Facebook users from the European Economic Area to the United States, explained the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).

This acts on behalf of the European Union, monitoring the application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU, because the European headquarters of the American group is in Ireland.

The decision also imposes on Meta “stop all transfers of personal data to the United States within five months” from being notified of the decision and complying with the GDPR within six months, added the DPC.

This fine, the highest ever imposed by a data protection regulator in Europe, is the result of an investigation launched in 2020.

But Meta describes it as “unjustified and unnecessary” and will act before the courts to try to suspend it, the social media giant responded in a statement sent to AFP on Monday.

Thousands of businesses and organizations rely on the ability to transfer data between the EU and the US” and “there is a fundamental legal conflict between US government rules on data access and European privacy rights”, continued the Californian giant.

Meta expects the United States and the European Union to adopt a new legal framework for the transfer of personal data in the coming months, following an agreement in principle reached last year.

“American Surveillance”

It’s a “hard blow for Meta”, the European association for the defense of privacy Noyb reacted in a statement (for “none of your business”, none of your business), which has filed numerous lawsuits against American tech giants in Europe.

Since Edward Snowden’s revelations about the aid provided by large US technology companies to the NSA’s (US National Security Agency) mass surveillance apparatus, Facebook – now Meta – has been the subject of litigation in Ireland”, he stressed.

Snowden, 39, is a Russian-born former US intelligence computer consultant who in 2013 leaked highly classified information about the use of information by the NSA, for whom he worked.

In the opinion of the Austrian Max Schrems, founder of Noyb, the sanction to Meta “it could have been much higher, given that the maximum fine is more than 4 billion and that Meta knowingly broke the law to generate profits for ten years”.

If US surveillance laws are not corrected, Meta will have to fundamentally restructure its systems”, he warned.

This is the third sanction to Meta in the EU since the beginning of 2023 and the fourth in six months.

In January, the DPC imposed a fine of almost 400 million euros for violations in the use of personal data for advertising purposes in its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp applications.

And in March he was fined 5.5 million euros for violating the GDPR with his WhatsApp messaging service.

Meta has since committed to changing its terms of use in Europe in order to continue to collect and process the personal data of its European users.

These sanctions take place in a context of increased controls and judicial processes in the European Union, but also in the United States, against the technological giants known as GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple), and the measures taken recently against the Chinese giant TikTok.

In 2021, Amazon was fined €746 million in Luxembourg for breaching the GDPR.

Source: AFP

Source: Gestion

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