There has been a major dispute over personal data between the European Union and the United States in recent years. This situation is triggered by the fact that companies such as US technology giants Meta, Apple and Microsoft transfer user data to the USA instead of keeping them in Europe. Finally, Meta, the umbrella company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, received a historical penalty of 1.2 billion euros (1.3 billion dollars) from the European Union.
Meta was fined $1.3 billion from the European Union!
European Union and American officials are negotiating a data sharing agreement that would provide new legal protections for Meta to continue to carry user information between the US and Europe. This has been going on for about 1 year.
However, the EU’s $1.3 billion penalty decision for Meta today shows that the talks have had no effect so far. Because companies continue to transfer data, EU citizens argue that Europeans do not protect them from US surveillance. In addition, even with such high penalties
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EU data protection rules, national security laws and other regulations compel companies to store data in the country where it was collected, rather than allowing it to move freely to data centers around the world.
For example, if Facebook wants to process the personal data of users in Turkey, the sites they visit or the news they click, and to display ads or pages accordingly, it will have to keep and process this data on servers it will open in Turkey. Because it brings with it the fear that the data may be presented to intelligence services such as the NSA due to many incidents in the past and brought to the US judiciary.
The penalty decision taken by the EU today was expected to be a record penalty under GDPR. That’s because Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, said in a statement to investors last month that about 10 percent of worldwide ad revenue comes from ads for Facebook users in EU countries. This corresponds to approximately 11.7 billion dollars of 117 billion dollars.
Of course, Meta and other U.S. companies are hoping for a new one to come after the old data agreement that was invalidated by European courts in 2020. And last year, Joe Biden and the President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the outline of this agreement in Brussels. However, as we mentioned, the details have been negotiated for a year and the EU does not seem to have the patience to wait.