LONDON (AP) – The European Union (EU) slapped Meta with a record USD1.3 billion privacy fine yesterday and ordered it to stop transferring user data across the Atlantic by October, the latest salvo in a decade-long case sparked by United States (US) cybersnooping fears.
The penalty fine of EUR1.2 billion from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission is the biggest since the EU’s strict data privacy regime took effect five years ago, surpassing Amazon’s EUR746-million penalty in 2021 for data protection violations.
The Irish watchdog is Meta’s lead privacy regulator in the 27-nation bloc because the Silicon Valley tech giant’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
Meta, which had previously warned that services for its users in Europe could be cut off, vowed to appeal and ask courts to immediately put the decision on hold.
“There is no immediate disruption to Facebook in Europe,” the company said.
“This decision is flawed, unjustified and sets a dangerous precedent for the countless other companies transferring data between the EU and US,” Meta’s president of global and affairs Nick Clegg and Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead said in a statement.
It’s yet another twist in a legal battle that began in 2013 when Austrian lawyer and privacy activist Max Schrems filed a complaint about Facebook’s handling of his data following former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations about US cybersnooping.
The saga has highlighted the clash between Washington and Brussels over the differences between Europe’s strict view on data privacy and the comparatively lax regime in the US, which lacks a federal privacy law. An agreement covering EU-US data transfers known as the Privacy Shield was struck down in 2020 by the EU’s top court, which said it didn’t do enough to protect residents from the US government’s electronic prying.
That left another tool to govern data transfers – stock legal contracts. Irish regulators initially ruled that Meta didn’t need to be fined because it was acting in good faith in using them to move data across the Atlantic.
