Meta fined USD 1.3 bn over data transfers to US: WSJ

Menlo Park (California) [US], May 22 (ANI): Facebook-owner Meta has been slapped a record 1.2 billion euros (USD 1.3 billion) for sending European Union (EU) user data to the US in breach of a previous court ruling, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), which acts on behalf of the European Union, said the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) had ordered it to collect “an administrative fine in the amount of 1.2 billion euros”.
The DPC has been investigating Meta Ireland’s transfer of personal data from the EU to the United States since 2020, WSJ said.

The EU regulators, led by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon, have been finalising a ban on the legal tool used by Facebook to transfer European user data because of concerns US intelligence agencies could access the information, according to WSJ.

In April, they said the Irish DPC had one month to make an order blocking Facebook’s transatlantic data flows, WSJ said, adding that the ban could be in place by mid-May.

Europe’s highest court ruled in 2020 that an EU-US data transfer agreement was invalid, citing surveillance concerns.

Meta last year warned that an order to ban the mechanism it uses to transfer data from Europe to the United States could force it to suspend Facebook services in Europe.

The DPC had wanted to force Meta to suspend the offending data transfers, saying that a fine “would exceed the extent of powers that could be described as being ‘appropriate, proportionate and necessary'”.

But its peer regulators in the EU, known as Concerned Supervisory Authorities (CSAs), disagreed.

“All four CSAs took the view that Meta Ireland should be subject to an administrative fine,” said the DPC.