Ireland’s data protection authority is informing its EU counterparts. that it will prohibit the platform from sending user data to the US
Europeans risk seeing social networking services Facebook and Instagram shut down this summer after Ireland’s privacy regulator ordered the company to stop sending user data to United Statesaccording to a Politico article.
The commission informed its counterparts in Europe on Thursday that it will block the platform from sending user data from Europe to the US. The Irish regulator’s draft decision circumvents its last legal recourse Meta to transfer data to the US, after years of bitter legal battles between the US tech giant and European privacy activists.
The European Court of Justice canceled in 2020 a pact EU – USA, to stream data, dubbed “Privacy Shield,” due to fears about US surveillance practices. With its decision, it also made it harder to use another legal tool that Meta and many other US companies use to transfer personal data to the US, called “standard contract clauses” (SCC). Ireland’s decision means Facebook is also forced to stop relying on SCCs.
Meta has repeatedly warned that such a decision would shut down many of its services in Europe, including Facebook and Instagram.
“If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely on other alternative means of data transfer from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer some of the most important products and our services, including Facebook and Instagram, in EuropeMeta reported to the US Securities and Exchange Commission in March 2022.
The Irish blocking order, if upheld by Europe’s group of national data protection regulators, is also likely to shock the wider business community, which is wondering how it will continue to send data from Europe to the US after the Supreme Court’s ruling EU. in 2020.
The E.U. and the US is in the midst of negotiations over a new data transfer text, which would allow companies like Meta to continue sending data across the Atlantic regardless of the Irish decision. The Brussels and Washington they agreed in March to a preliminary deal at the political level, but negotiations over the legal fine print are stuck and a final deal is unlikely to be reached before the end of the year.
A spokesman for the Irish DPC confirmed that the draft decision had been sent to other European data protection regulators, who have a month to comment, but would not discuss details of the decision.
“We welcome the EU-US agreement on a new legal framework that will allow the continuous cross-border transfer of data and expect that this framework will enable us to keep families, communities and economies connected“, said a representative of Meta.
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