Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Once again the EU show us silly Yanks how privacy protection should be done by slapping Facebook (still not calling them Meta) with a $1.3B fine for privacy violations under GDPR. Yes, Facebook is being fined for privacy violations. I’ll wait for you to catch your breath.
What’s shocking is not that Facebook has been lax at best, and actively malicious at worst with EU citizen data, it’s that they’re actually being held to account. Not only that, but the ruling that came down from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also orders Facebook to stop transferring data from the EU to servers hosted in the US, an action previously allowed under the Privacy Shield pact. That was declared invalid in 2020 by the EU courts because the US couldn’t keep their grubby hands off EU citizen data.
The ban takes effect in 5 months and all EU data needs to be purged in 6 months. Of course, Facebook can simply pay the fine and say “No thanks” to the rest, which they may be inclined to do, since $1.3B represents about 1% of their annual revenue for 2022. Revenue that relies on selling ads that target some portion of the EU populace. So while I laud the EU, we need to do a little enforcement on this side of the pond as well.