Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, May 22 (Xinhua)-- EU privacy regulators announced earlier today that Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 9.108 billion yuan) for transmitting EU user data to the United States, the highest fine ever imposed by the European Union for privacy violations.

Meta Platforms subsequently announced that it would appeal against the EU's ruling on the transmission of data to the United States and what the company called "unreasonable and unnecessary fines." Meta said Facebook operations in Europe would not be interrupted immediately and that "there is a fundamental legal conflict between US government data access regulations and European privacy rights, which policy makers are expected to resolve in the summer".

The European Court of Justice held that such data transfer would infringe on the privacy of EU citizens, a complaint stemming from Edward Snowden's revelation of a large-scale US surveillance program in 2013. The ruling was made by the Irish data Protection Board (DPC), which said that the current legal framework for data transfer "did not address the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms of Facebook users in Europe" and violated the General data Protection regulations (GDPR).

The penalty exceeds the highest EU fine of 746 million euros imposed in 2021 for the same privacy violations by Amazon.

The transfer of data to the United States is crucial to Meta's vast advertising positioning business, which relies on processing a variety of users' personal data. Last year, Meta said that if it could not send the data back to the United States, it would be forced to consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in the European Union, which EU politicians saw as a threat.

Previously, these data transfers were protected by a transatlantic agreement, the Privacy Shield. But the framework was invalidated in 2020 after the European Union's Supreme Court found that it did not protect data from US surveillance programs.

Although Meta has now been ordered to stop the data transfer, there are some reservations in favor of the American social media giant. First of all, this ruling applies only to Facebook's data, not to other Meta companies, such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Second, there is a grace period of five months before Meta must stop future transfers and six months before it must stop holding current data in the United States. Third, and most importantly, the EU and the US are currently negotiating a new data transfer agreement, which could be reached as early as this summer and as late as October.

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