The European Union had previously prohibited Meta from transferring the data of European users to the United States. Meta plans to appeal the verdict.
The American company Meta, which owns Facebook, has been fined 1.2 billion euros for violating European Union privacy regulations.
The fines were imposed because the data of European Facebook users had been uploaded to US servers. According to the EU, the information could have reached the US intelligence agencies.
The transfer is against the so-called GDPR data protection regulation introduced by the EU in 2018, which aims to protect the personal data of EU citizens.
The European Union had previously prohibited Meta from transferring the data of European users to the United States.
The fine is larger than the previous record, the €746 million fine Amazon received in 2021 for violating privacy protection.
Meta has previously received four fines of hundreds of millions of euros from the EU.
Meta has threatened to stop its popular services, such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, in Europe if the US and the EU do not reach an agreement on a new data protection regulation.
Metaa says that he hopes that the United States and the EU will reach an agreement in the coming months on how user data is transferred between the countries.
Last year, an agreement in principle was reached between the two countries, but it has not been possible to put it in the form of an agreement.
According to the spokesperson of the European Commission, the agreement could be concluded by the summer, i.e. in the next few weeks.
Meta plans to appeal the verdict. It has until November to delete or transfer back user data transferred to US servers in the EU.