[ad_1]
Facebook has been the recipient of many legislative inquiries and litigation around the world and has lost many of those fights in Europe. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s trying to be too careful now that the region has passed new privacy-related rules. The European social media giant’s instant messaging services Messenger and Instagram (which recently “merged”) might now see a concerning notification when they try to use features. Facebook assures that this situation is only temporary.
The new rules in the Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, abbreviated as the Electronic Privacy Directive, simply limit what companies can do with the messages you send and the metadata attached to those messages. The rules apply not only to telecommunications companies, but also to “over-the-top” messaging services, exactly like Messenger and Instagram. That, however, doesn’t exactly apply to other “fun” things the services do, which is what makes Facebook’s move a bit curious.
Those fun things include things like stickers or taking polls in group chats, but these are just some of the features that will make the warning appear. Even something as simple as setting a nickname for a contact is apparently disabled as well. Facebook will warn users that some functions are temporarily unavailable to respect the new rules in Europe.
The social media giant doesn’t have a list of the features that are currently disabled because it says it doesn’t really matter. Soon they will return quickly, although it does not give a timetable for their return either. Given the importance of these services, they probably won’t stop them for long.
It is still puzzling and almost funny that Facebook has decided to pause these features that have no direct bearing on the Electronic Privacy Directive. Maybe these features actually contain some metadata that violates those new rules or Facebook is just trying to be more careful this time.
