The Meta Platforms company in Europe was fined a record amount of $1.3 billion.
Source: Pixabay.com
This fine is related to accusations that the technology giant violated the European data privacy law. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced the penalty on Monday, May 22.
The decision to impose a penalty against the company was made after the regulator found that Meta had committed violations of the General Data Protection Rules in Europe (GDPR). In this case, the main claim is related to the fact that the technology giant failed to protect the data of European Facebook users from surveillance in the United States.
Meta’s European headquarters is located in Ireland. The main European offices of Microsoft, Uber, and Amazon also operate in this country. Due to this circumstance, the Irish authorities have the authority to regulate the activities of companies.
This fine was the largest in the history associated with GDPR. The previous record value of this penalty was recorded in 2021 when Amazon in Luxembourg was fined $806 million.
Meta in its blog announced its intention to appeal the decision of the Irish regulator and called the fine unreasonable and unnecessary. The company plans to get the suspension of the resolution through the court.
The tech giant said there would be no immediate problems with Facebook’s work in Europe since the implementation of the decision on a fine is a step-by-step and time-stretched process.
By October of this year, Meta must suspend any future transfer of personal information in the United States. The company also has six months to stop the illegal processing of confidential data of European users by American organizations.
This fine became possible after the decree of the European Court of Justice in 2020 on the cancellation of the agreement between the US and the EU on data flows, known as Privacy Shield. The reason for the relevant decision was concerns about the practice of surveillance by American intelligence agencies.
The European Court of Justice ruled that the US guarantees regarding the personal information of Europeans are not sufficiently reliable. After that, Meta had to rely on a legal tool known as Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) to maintain the data flow.
At the same time, it was announced in Europe that the SCC is not enough to comply with the decision of the EU court.
Currently, the EU and the US are working on a new data flow agreement, which is expected to be signed by the end of 2023.
In January of this year, Meta was also fined by the DPC. Then the amount of the fine was $ 422 million. This decision was made after the conclusion that the advertising business model of the technology giant does not comply with GDPR.
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