Will Facebook, Instagram and other Meta group services be banned in Europe? The question arises after the measure taken by Ireland, which decided to block the transfer of personal data to the United States.
Meta has definitely had a lot of setbacks lately. While its platforms face competition from TikTok and the scandals about its management of personal data are linked, Ireland has just taken a decision with serious consequences. Indeed, just a few months after having imposed a fine of 17 million euros on the social network, the Irish regulator decided this Thursday, June 7 to block the transfer of data from European residents to the United States, including for the group Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. He asks the other countries of the European Union to do the same. If they do not speak in the coming weeks, we can say goodbye to our dear social networks.
Ireland bases its decision on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which prohibits the transfer of personal data of European Union nationals to third countries if their level of protection is not equivalent to that of the EU. However, this is not the case in the United States, whose Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield systems authorized American public authorities to have access to it. These agreements were invalidated by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ruled that the surveillance programs of American intelligence agencies pose a threat to the personal information of Europeans stored on servers in the United States. . As a result, all European data protection institutions have one month to issue their opinion on the matter, otherwise all American companies using “standard contractual clauses” to transfer European data will be banned from the territory.
Towards a new agreement between the United States and the European Union?
Already in March, Meta warned of the consequences of these decisions for the maintenance of its services in the European Union: “If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or other alternative means of transferring data from Europe to the United States, we may not be able to offer a number of our most important products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe“, declared the company in a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
It is an arm wrestling match between the United States and the European Union. But do not panic, since the two powers are in the process of negotiating a new text aimed at regulating the transfer of data between them, including in Ireland. A preliminary agreement has been reached, although the parties are blocking on the legal details. In any case, it is very unlikely that the United States will allow large companies like Meta to deprive themselves of the European market, as this would be a very serious blow to their economy. Meta has also declared to Politico that “We welcome the agreement between the EU and the United States to lay down a new legal framework that will allow the continuous transfer of data across borders. We hope this framework will allow us to keep families, communities and economies connected..”
A new agreement could be beneficial for Europe, especially after the various scandals that have plagued Meta. As a reminder, the Cambridge Analytica case had highlighted the leak of personal data of 87 million Facebook users that Cambridge Analytica had started to exploit in early 2014. This information was used in particular to influence voting intentions in favor of Facebook. ‘politicians. More recently, hospitals reportedly sent private patient information to Facebook, potentially sharing health information with the social network through an ad tracker.