Facebook Fined By EU For Violating Privacy

Just recently, the European Union announced that it has fined Meta. The reason behind this penalty of $1.3 billion is that the parent company of Facebook did not adhere to some laws of the bloc.

The accused, Facebook, was responsible for transferring the user data of citizens of the EU to the United States.

As per the Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta is liable for breaking the laws set forth. In its words, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the EU was violated the second Facebook transferred its valuable data.

Given that the headquarters of Meta is located in Dublin, it is required to follow these laws. A violation of which has a fine of a particular amount.

It has been reported that this is the largest ever GDPR fine that has been handed down. It has surpassed the penalty of $887 that was paid by Amazon back in 2021.

According to the new ruling for Meta, the parent company of Facebook has only five months to set up measures to put a stop to any future transfers of personal information to any country, including the United States.

EU has made it clear that it will only give six months to Facebook to halt the unlawful processing, as well as storage, of personal data belonging to citizens of the region and EEA.

In case this ruling is enforced, the social media platform will have to remove a large amount of data and opt for a complete restructuring of all its IT systems. This will include starting from scratch.

Moreover, there will be a number of implications for other firms wanting or trying to transfer data between any two regions or areas.

As of now, the best hope of ensuring that Meta does not have to go through all this trouble would be to establish a treaty of data transfer between the two zones, namely the EU and the US.

Back in 2020, the transfers of data were protected under the Privacy Shield Treaty, which was signed by both governments.

In the same year, the treaty was invalidated by the highest court of the EU, which said that it failed to protect the personal data of citizens of the EU from any American spy agencies wanting to cash in on it.

Ever since the court revealed its last ruling, both regions have been trying to negotiate a different treaty.

Just last year, the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, and Joseph Biden, the President of the United States, announced that another deal was in progress.

Though they did not disclose any details of the new deal that they are making, they did say that the two regions are trying to work out terms that benefit both of them.

This new ruling has been speculated to add even more pressure on the US to smooth out any issues and strike up a new deal.

However, there are various complex issues, which make it difficult to move ahead and get a deal done right away.