Meta fined $1.3 billion by EU for sending user data to US: Report

The Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc was hit with a record fine amounting to $1.3 billion by European Union privacy regulators for sending user data to the United States.

Just after the judgement was announced Meta assured that there would be no disruptions to access to social media platform Facebook in Europe.

The Irish Data Protection Commission on Monday announced their judgement on Monday citing the fact that Meta Platforms' continued data transfers to the US didn’t address “the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms" of people whose data was being transferred across the Atlantic.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, which acts on behalf of the European Union, said the European Data Protection Board had ordered it to collect "an administrative fine in the amount of 1.2 billion euros".

Following the judgement, Meta also noted that they would appeal to the Irish DPC data transfer ruling, including ‘unjustified and unnecessary fine’.

The social media giant also noted that they will seek a stay of orders through the courts.

The judgement is just another brick in the saga of long-running turmoil that has seen several big corporates plunge into legal vaccums.

In 2020, the EU’s top court annulled an EU-US pact regulating transatlantic data flows over fears citizens’ data wasn’t safe once it arrived on US servers.

While judges didn’t strike down an alternative tool based on contractual clauses, their doubts about American data protection quickly led to a preliminary order from the Irish authority telling Facebook it could no longer move data to the US via this other method either.