Facebook Threatens To Withdraw From Europe Due To Data Protection Dispute

The dispute between the data protection authorities and the social network Facebook is getting worse. Now the US company threatened to withdraw its services from Europe. That would affect around 410 million users.

The company responded with its announcement to order according to which data from European users may no longer be transmitted to the USA and evaluated there. That was decided by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). This in turn was preceded by a ruling by the European Court of Justice, according to which the contract between the EU and the USA on the handling of such data was void.

“It is not clear how we could continue to provide the services of Facebook and Instagram in the EU under these circumstances,” said Yvonne Cunnane, who is responsible for privacy issues in the legal department of Facebook’s Irish branch, according to a report in Vice magazine.

Mimimi from the large corporation

The company had previously fired against the Irish data protection authorities in a rather unobjective manner in relation to the court in which the whole dispute is pending. The DPC would simply behave unfairly towards Facebook and, for whatever reasons, attack the US company much harder than other companies. However, it is also true that the Irish authorities, in particular, were very careless with Facebook for a long time and that it only pressured from other EU member states that made the authority a little more active.

Cunnane also gave the impression that the decision against Facebook was ultimately down to Helen Dixon, the Irish data protection officer as an individual. The group representative also complained that they had been informed too late about the upcoming decisions and that they only had three weeks to react to the latest decisions.

Cunnane emphasized that one should not understand her statements as a threat, which they are subliminally but nevertheless. As the lawyer explained, the only thing that matters is that Facebook remains an important tool for millions of users in Europe with which they can express their views. In addition, it is also an important economic platform for companies in the EU that generate sales of over 200 billion euros on Facebook.