Facebook parent company Meta has been slapped with a penalty of €1.2 billion for transferring data of European users to the servers operating in the United States. A move that is dead-against the GDPR rules that came into existence since May 2018.
The Irish Data Protection Commission pronounced a penalty and imposed a $1.3 billion fine for transferring the generated data to computers operating on other country soil, a move that is been exploited under the Standard Contractual Clause (SCC) that came into effect before July 16th,2020.
Till the year 2020, European Union (EU) and North America were operating under the Privacy Shield agreement of sharing free data flow among both the countries.
However, after the whistle blowing act linked to Cambridge Data Analytics scandal surfaced, fears on surveillance grew among the public in both continents. So, the European Court of Jus-tice brought to life a new act that prevented companies operating in EU from transferring data to other country soil.
Since, Meta failed to comply with this law, the data watchdog was forced to impose a $1.3 bil-lion penalty, perhaps the highest in the history of Meta till date. However, a time frame of 6 months or the timeline until Oct 12th,2023 has been granted and from then the technology giant should stop using the SCCs clause and start following the new set of GDPR rules, where infor-mation generated in one continent should be stored and analyzed in the same region.
Will the parent company of the world’s largest social network firm listen now? And will it fol-low the rules as said?
Well, strictly speaking, we do not know what exactly happens behind the walls of the said mul-tinational data centers.
Though, most of them take a pledge that the do respect the privacy and security of the users, they act pale when a data breach or some kind of rule-break occurs.
