The order to halt data transfers to the US comes with the biggest penalties of its type. The situation dates back to 2013 and the disclosures of US mass spying.
EU data regulators have fined Meta a record-breaking $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion) and ordered it to stop sending Facebook data of EU citizens to the US. As a result of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding US mass surveillance programs in 2013, EU judges have expressed concern that such data transfers subject EU individuals to privacy infringement.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) of Ireland issued the decision, noting that the GDPR had been broken and that the current legislative framework for data transfers to the US “did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms” of Facebook’s EU users. The penalty is more than the previous record set by the EU, which was €746 million assessed against Amazon in 2021 for similar privacy infractions.
For Meta’s massive ad-targeting business, which depends on processing several streams of personal data from its consumers, data transfer to the US is essential. Last year, Meta warned that if it couldn’t transmit data back to the US, it could have to consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in the EU; this statement was taken as a clear threat by EU legislators.
Previously, a transatlantic agreement known as the Privacy Shield covered these data transfers. But in 2020, the EU’s top court ruled that this framework was ineffective since it did not prevent data from being scraped by US surveillance programs. This decision was made in response to a claim made by Austrian attorney Max Schrems, whose legal dispute with Facebook began in 2013 with the initial Snowden revelations of US monitoring.
Despite the fact that Meta has been told to stop these data transfers, there are a few restrictions that favor the US social media juggernaut. First off, other Meta firms like Instagram and WhatsApp are not affected by the decision; just Facebook data is. Second, Meta has a five-month window of time before it must stop making new transfers, and it has six months to stop storing current data in the US. The third and most crucial point is that the EU and the US are now in negotiations for a new data transfer agreement that could be finalized as early as this summer or as late as October.
Experts expressed skepticism that the record-breaking penalties would substantially alter Meta’s privacy practices despite its enormity.
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