TECH NEWS — Meta, formerly Facebook, has been hit with a record €1.2bn (about $1.3bn) fine by European privacy regulators due to the company's transfer of EU user data to the US. CNBC reports.
The decision is linked to a previous case brought by an Austrian privacy campaigner named Max Schrems, who argued that the framework designed to transfer EU citizen data to America did not protect Europeans against US surveillance.
In 2020, the European Court of Justice struck down the latest mechanism aimed at legally transferring personal data between the US and EU, commonly known as Privacy Shield.
The Irish Data Protection Commission claimed that Meta infringed the General Data Protection Regulation when it continued to send the personal data of European citizens to the US, despite the European court's verdict of 2020.
To transfer data in and out of the EU, Meta used standard contractual clauses, which were not blocked by any EU court. However, the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, adopted the clauses, along with other measures implemented by Meta, but Ireland's data watchdog argued that these arrangements did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of EU citizens.
Meta has been asked by Ireland's Data Protection Commission to halt any future transfer of personal data to the US for five months from the decision. Meanwhile, the 1.2 billion euro penalty against Meta is the largest any company has ever been fined for violating GDPR, with Amazon previously being charged a 746 million euro fine for breaching the regulation in 2021.
Meta has stated that it would appeal against the decision and the fine. Meta's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, and the chief legal officer at the company, Jennifer Newstead, said in a blog post on Monday that they would also immediately seek a stay with the courts.
They claimed that implementing these orders would significantly harm millions of Facebook users who use the service every day. The Meta case has renewed the focus on the EU and Washington's attempt to reach a new data transfer agreement.
Meta is hopeful that this EU-U.S. data privacy agreement will be established before the Irish regulator's deadlines come into effect. If the new framework is established before the deadlines expire, the company's services can continue as they do today without any disruptions or impact on users, Clegg and Newstead said.
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