Due to an explosion with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, Facebook is threatening to leave the European market if regulators do not allow it. Easy to say, intervening would be a great loss.

If the Irish data protection authority prohibits Facebook from transferring European user data to the United States, the company will be forced to cease its activities in the European market, Facebook itself said. The antecedent of the threat message is that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) annulled in July the agreement between the US and Europe on the transfer of data, the so-called Privacy Shield.

Facebook has been processing collected user data, including packages collected in Europe, from the beginning in America. Data collection is an important activity for a business: by analyzing this data, it allows its advertisers to bombard users with mostly personalized (targeted) ads. However, by voiding the agreement, which is called the data protection shield in Hungarian, the possibility of a data flow between Europe and America (thus also the processing process) can be eliminated, which can cause a serious disadvantage for Facebook from a business point of view.

The company, of course, did not leave things to that point and challenged the Irish Data Protection Authority’s data export ban. The company entered there because Facebook’s European data center is located here, and the implementation of the agreement is already the responsibility of the Member State authority, in this case the Irish one.

In its presentation, Facebook biasedly argued that while other US companies collect data in Europe, EU regulators have only singled out Facebook. They also said that if they couldn’t reach the winery, they wouldn’t know how to ensure the operation of their services, including Instagram, in Europe. Of course, Facebook is unlikely to live up to its threat, as too much money is being migrated from here – about a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from Europe. If this were to disappear from one moment to the next, it could have a drastic impact on the value of Facebook documents.

If you ever want to know about similar things, check out the Facebook page in the HVG Tech section.



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