Goalthe owner of Facebook, will probably have to face a record fine in the European Union. It is rumored that the penalty will exceed the one imposed on Amazon in 2021 by the Luxembourg regulatory authorities, of almost 750 million euros. According to Bloomberg, it will be a punishment for the company for failing to comply with a court order of the region so that protect user data of the security services of the United States once they were sent to servers located in the American continent.
The sanction will be imposed by the Irish Data Protection Commission, a regulatory entity in charge of supervising the operations of the main US technology companies in the European Union. In addition to a fine, the sanction will also be associated with an order for the company to stop all data transfers to the United States that until now are based on insecure contractual clauses, which the High Court of the EU has called into question.
This is the latest episode in a saga that has many companies in a legal vacuum. EU judges in 2020 struck down an EU decision regulating transatlantic data flows out of fear that citizens’ information would not be secure once it was sent to the United States.
Although they did not repeal a contractual alternative, concerns about data protection in the United States led to a preliminary order by the Irish authorities, which ordered Facebook to stop transferring data to the United States through this method as well. As a consequence, a total ban on data transfers was expected, which has already led Meta to threaten to withdraw from the EU once.
The decision on the sanction to Meta, which will only affect Facebook and not to the rest of the company’s services, arrive before the fifth anniversary of the application of the GDPR. When it arrives, the data transfer ban will see a transition period, and Meta will almost certainly appeal it to the Irish courts. By the time the final resolution of the sanction comes out, it is likely that new regulations on the transfer of data between both sides of the Atlantic have already entered into force.
