The European Union has imposed a fine of 1.3 billion dollars on Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
There has been a significant disagreement over personal data between the European Union and the United States in recent years. Particularly, tech giants from the US, like Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, transferring user data to the US instead of storing it in Europe triggers this situation. Recently, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, received a historic fine of 1.2 billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) from the European Union.
Meta fined 1.3 billion dollars by the European Union!
The European Union and American officials are in talks over a data sharing agreement that would provide new legal protections for Meta to continue transferring user information between the US and Europe. This has been going on for about a year.
However, the 1.3 billion dollar fine for Meta issued by the EU today shows that the negotiations have had no impact so far. Because companies continue to transfer data, and the EU argues that this does not protect EU citizens from US surveillance.
The EU’s data protection rules, national security laws, and other regulations force companies to store data in the country where it is collected, rather than allowing it to move freely to data centers around the world.
For example, if Facebook wants to present ads or pages based on personal data of users in Turkey, websites they browse, or news they click, it must store and process this data on servers it would open in Turkey. This is because past events that were taken to US courts bring along the fear that the data could be presented to intelligence services like the NSA.
The fine imposed by the EU today was expected to be a record fine within the scope of GDPR. This is because Susan Li, the chief financial officer of Meta, said in a statement to investors last month that about 10% of the company’s worldwide advertising revenue comes from ads targeted at Facebook users in EU countries. This corresponds to about 11.7 billion of the approximately 117 billion dollars.
Of course, Meta and other US companies are hoping for a new data agreement to replace the old one invalidated by European courts in 2020. Last year, Joe Biden and the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the main lines of this agreement in Brussels. However, as we mentioned, the details have been negotiated for a year, and the EU seems to be running out of patience.
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