Facebook Fined $122 Million Over Privacy
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 05/18/2017 10:48 AM
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The European Commission considered that Facebook provided "incorrect or misleading" information when it purchased WhatsApp in 2014 and fined Facebook $122 million.
The European Union’s antitrust regulators said that Facebook breached its promise to not combine its data with that of WhatsApp, but did just that. It said that combining the data presented an unfair advantage when it comes to advertising and psychometrics.
During that same week, WhatsApp was fined €3 million by the Italian competition and consumer authority and Facebook was fined €150,000 by the French data protection regulator in relation to the companies' use of customer data. Germany is also looking into Facebooks privacy practices.
“Several transactions in recent years, including Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp and Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn have been at least partly motivated by the desire to gain access to valuable data,” said Richard Craig, senior associate in the IT, telecoms and competition team at International law firm Taylor Wessing. “These transactions are facing increasing scrutiny, in particular by privacy advocates, who fear that these deals will lead to a degradation of privacy protection for consumers.”
"The fine shows the importance of being fully transparent with competition regulators when filing for merger control clearance, although some will no doubt claim that the commission should have gone further and reopened the investigation into the transaction,” Craig added. "This is in large part as a result of an increasing focus on the relationship between the access that the major tech companies have to large and complex datasets and the potential for this to adversely affect competition.”
In the meantime, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that teenagers under the age of 18 will have the right to permanently delete information about themselves, known as the “right to be forgotten” to teenagers.
Source: Info Security
The European Union’s antitrust regulators said that Facebook breached its promise to not combine its data with that of WhatsApp, but did just that. It said that combining the data presented an unfair advantage when it comes to advertising and psychometrics.During that same week, WhatsApp was fined €3 million by the Italian competition and consumer authority and Facebook was fined €150,000 by the French data protection regulator in relation to the companies' use of customer data. Germany is also looking into Facebooks privacy practices.
“Several transactions in recent years, including Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp and Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn have been at least partly motivated by the desire to gain access to valuable data,” said Richard Craig, senior associate in the IT, telecoms and competition team at International law firm Taylor Wessing. “These transactions are facing increasing scrutiny, in particular by privacy advocates, who fear that these deals will lead to a degradation of privacy protection for consumers.”
"The fine shows the importance of being fully transparent with competition regulators when filing for merger control clearance, although some will no doubt claim that the commission should have gone further and reopened the investigation into the transaction,” Craig added. "This is in large part as a result of an increasing focus on the relationship between the access that the major tech companies have to large and complex datasets and the potential for this to adversely affect competition.”
In the meantime, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has announced that teenagers under the age of 18 will have the right to permanently delete information about themselves, known as the “right to be forgotten” to teenagers.
Source: Info Security
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