EU Fines Meta $1.3 Billion for Mishandling European Facebook Users' Data
Key Highlights :
The European Union (EU) on Monday imposed a record-breaking fine of $1.3 billion on Meta for mishandling European Facebook users' data. This marks the largest fine since the EU implemented stricter data privacy laws in 2018, and the end of a decade-long case that was filed by Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems.
Meta was fined for transferring European users' data to the US without following the Privacy Shield framework, which was implemented in 2016 and was later struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020. The company was also ordered to return all personal data to its EU data centers within six months.
In response to the ruling, Meta said in a statement that it plans to appeal the "unjustified and unnecessary fine," and Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, and Jennifer Newstead, chief legal officer at Meta, said in a blog post that the decision is "flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and US."
The EU's Digital Services Act forces big tech companies to protect European users from hate speech, disinformation and other harmful online content. The EU and US also followed the Privacy Shield framework, which allowed companies on both sides of the Atlantic to transfer personal data while following protection requirements.
The ruling is the latest in a series of actions taken by the EU against big tech companies in recent years. In 2021, Amazon was fined $800 million for data protection violations. Meta now has to fundamentally restructure its systems, unless US surveillance laws get fixed.
The decision only applied to Facebook, not Meta’s other platforms. There was no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe on Monday. Meta argued that the "ability for data to be transferred across borders is fundamental to how the global open internet works," and that stopping "the free flow of data" would restrict the global economy and leave citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services we have come to rely on.
