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Meta is facing a major legal decision within months that could see it shutter its Facebook service in Europe.
Ireland’s privacy chief Helen Dixon, who heads the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), told POLITICO she was “very likely” to strike a final verdict on Facebook’s last legal tool for sending personal data to the U.S. before the European Union and the United States manage to roll out a new data-transfer agreement. The DPC in July issued its draft decision to suspend the legal tool, which is now pending approval by fellow privacy regulators in Europe and would be finalized by mid-May.
That means that U.S. tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook, is expected to find itself without the tools to legally transfer personal data like family pictures and geolocation data to the U.S. for its Facebook service.
The tech firm has previously said such a decision could shutter its services in Europe, including Instagram. Most recently, it said in February that “if no adequacy decision is adopted by the European Commission and we are unable to continue to rely on [standard contractual clauses] or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from the European Union to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe.” The Irish decision would also spell trouble for other companies using the legal tool for data transfers to the U.S.
The EU network of national data protection authorities — the European Data Protection Board — is set to decide by April 14 whether to confirm a previous Irish decision to suspend a legal tool largely used by companies, including Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) to transfer personal data to the U.S., called standard contractual clauses. The Irish regulator, which is the main European regulator for Meta and other Ireland-headquartered Big Tech firms, will then have another month to take its final decision.
Meanwhile, the European Commission is aiming to finalize a brand-new data agreement with the U.S. before July after the EU’s Court of Justice annulled two previous deals over U.S. surveillance fears.
Dixon said she did not plan to back down on enforcement of the EU’s data protection and privacy law, the GDPR. “We will pursue the enforcement action that we have set out,” she said in an interview.
“There are, of course, potential legal avenues any company could go down, but it would be very unclear and uncertain as to whether a company could obtain a stay in the circumstances of this case, on the order we impose,” she added. (A “stay” refers to a court action to stop a legal proceeding.)
A spokesperson for Meta said: “This case relates to a historic conflict of EU and U.S. law, which is in the process of being resolved via the new EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework … We welcome the progress policy-makers have made toward ensuring the continued transfer of data across borders and await the regulator’s final decision on this matter.”
