According to two persons familiar with the situation, Meta Platforms is likely to receive a record-breaking European Union privacy penalties for failing to heed a top EU court’s warning about the transfer of Facebook user data from EU to US servers.
According to the sources, the fine will be larger than the previous record 746 million euros ($821.20 million) charged to Amazon.
Meta declined to comment. Also, the requests for comment from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and the European Commission were not immediately answered.
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Because they were concerned that American spy agencies would gain access to the data, EU regulators under the direction of Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon have been working to finalize a prohibition on the legal mechanism used by Facebook to transfer European user data.
They had stated in April that the Irish DPC had a month to issue a ruling banning Facebook’s transatlantic data flows. Mid-May may see the implementation of the ban.
A data transfer agreement between the EU and the US was declared unconstitutional in 2020 by the highest court in Europe, citing privacy concerns. A prohibition on the method Meta employs to send data from Europe to the US could compel it to halt Facebook services in Europe, Meta said last year.
