Ireland’s data protection regulator has moved a step closer to a ruling that could halt EU-US data transfers from Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, according to an updated draft shared with other EU regulators on Thursday, Reuters reported.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) issued an interim injunction in 2020 to block the mechanism Meta uses to transfer EU user data to the United States after Europe’s highest court invalidated an agreement that allowed it to do so over concerns about monitoring.
After the ruling, the European Union and the United States announced a preliminary data transfer agreement to end the backlog, and data flow continued pending a final agreement.
However, the DPC’s investigation continued in parallel and informed its EU counterparts of its draft final decision on Thursday, a spokesman for the authority said. The spokesman declined to comment on the specific content of the decision.
The DPC is the lead EU regulator for Meta and many other of the biggest tech companies, due to their EU headquarters being located in Ireland.
Under EU privacy rules introduced in 2018, regulators across the bloc have a month to give their own views before a final decision is made. Any objections, which have been routinely filed in such cases, could add months to the timeline.
Meta has warned that an outage would likely render it unable to offer major services such as Facebook and Instagram in Europe without a new transatlantic data transfer framework.
DPC chief Helen Dixon told Reuters in February that the disruption to Meta’s data stream would not directly affect other big tech companies, but that there would potentially be “hundreds of thousands of entities” that would need to be looked at.
The final Irish order would not apply to Meta’s subsidiary WhatsApp, as it has a different data controller within the group.
“This draft decision, which is subject to review by European data protection authorities, concerns a conflict of EU and US law which is in the process of being resolved,” a Meta spokesperson said on Thursday.
“We welcome the EU-US agreement on a new legal framework that will enable the continuous transfer of data across borders, and we expect that this framework will enable us to keep families, communities and economies connected.”
When the interim deal was struck in March, EU officials said it would likely take months to turn it into a final deal.
Source: Capital
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