Irish regulators approach ban on Facebook’s EU-US dataflow

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Dublin — Ireland’s data privacy regulators have ruled that meta-owned Facebook and Instagram could suspend EU-US data transfers when sharing updated draft orders with other EU regulators on Thursday. A step closer, said the spokesperson.

The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has ruled that the European Supreme Court has granted invalidity due to surveillance concerns, and then a tentative order to block the mechanism Meta uses to transfer data about EU users to the United States. Was published in 2020.

After the block was issued, the European Union and the United States announced a preliminary data transfer agreement to end the problem, and the data flow continues until a final agreement.

However, DPC investigations are continuing in parallel, a spokesman said, informing EU counterparts of a draft final decision on Thursday. A spokeswoman refused to comment on the specifics of the decision.

With its EU headquarters in Ireland, DPC is the leading regulator of the EU Meta and other world’s largest technology companies.

The EU Privacy Regulations introduced in 2018 require regulators within the block to comment within a month before reaching a final decision. Regularly filed complaints in such cases can take months on the timeline.

Meta warns that the outage could prevent it from offering critical services such as Facebook and Instagram in Europe without the new transatlantic data transfer framework.

Helen Dixon, head of DPC, told Reuters in February that the outage of Meta’s dataflow wouldn’t immediately affect other big tech companies, but “hundreds of thousands of entities need to be considered. “May exist.”

The final Irish order does not apply to Meta’s WhatsApp subsidiary because there are different data controllers within the group.

“This draft decision, which is subject to review by the European data protection authorities, is related to the conflict between EU and US law in the process of resolution,” a Meta spokeswoman said Thursday.

“We welcome the EU-US agreement on a new legal framework that will enable the continued transfer of data across borders. We hope that this framework will help us maintain family, community and economic ties. “

When the tentative agreement was reached in March, EU officials said it could take several months before it turned into a final legal transaction.

Reuters

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