Regulators in the European Union have fined Meta a record-breaking €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) for sending the personal information of Facebook users in the EU to servers in the US.
In a statement released on Monday, the European Data Protection Board said the sanction was the result of an investigation into Facebook (FB) conducted by the Irish Data Protection Commission, the principal oversight body for Meta’s European activities.
The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is the most significant data privacy regulation in Europe, and the fine is the highest one ever imposed under it. In 2021, Amazon (AMZN) was assessed a fine of €746 million ($805.7 million), which was the previous record.
Additionally, Meta has been given a six-month deadline to stop processing the personal data of European users in the US.
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Infringement by Meta is “very serious since it concerns transfers that are systematic, repetitive, and continuous,” according to Andrea Jelinek, chair of the European Data Protection Board.
The owner of Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta, announced that it will challenge the judgment and the punishment. Facebook in Europe wouldn’t be immediately affected, it was added.
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The corporation claimed that a “conflict of law” existed between European privacy rights and US data access laws at the core of the problem. Under a new transatlantic Data Privacy Framework, politicians in the EU and the US were on a “clear path” to settling this disagreement.
The new framework aims to put an end to the uncertainty businesses have been in January 2020, when the European Union’s top court invalidated the Privacy Shield agreement between the European Union and the United States, which approximately 5,000 companies relied on to transmit data across borders.
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The European Data Protection Board “chose to disregard the clear progress that policymakers are making to resolve this underlying issue,” according to a statement from Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, and Jennifer Newstead, chief legal officer.